


Timeshared

by josephina_x



Category: Smallville
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Enslavement (Virtual), F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Abuse, Mental Anguish, Psychological Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-07-04
Updated: 2012-07-04
Packaged: 2017-11-09 03:36:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/450807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josephina_x/pseuds/josephina_x
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The explicit use of the Orb actually <i>did</i> work the way everyone thought it would... more-or-less... and Clark discovers that he isn't who he thought he was...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Timeshared

**Author's Note:**

> Title: Timeshared (Part 1)  
> Author: [josephina_x](http://josephina-x.livejournal.com)  
> Fandom: Smallville  
> Pairing: Clark, Lex  
> Rating: R  
> Spoilers: general for the entire series; follows canon up through season 7 and a little of 8x01, but events and particulars diverge (at times rather drastically) from that point onward  
> Word count: 24,900+  
> Summary: The explicit use of the Orb actually _did_ work the way everyone thought it would... more-or-less... and Clark discovers that he isn't who he thought he was...  
>  Warnings: Un-beta'd. AU. Darkfic-ish. Rating for violence, nonconsensual enslavement and torture (both physical and mental). It, uh, gets better, though, making its way towards H/C. *coughs*  
> Disclaimer: Not mine, not-for-profit.  
> Comments: Yes, please! :)  
> Author's Note: I really don't know why more people don't play around with this basic premise. Should I leave out carrots and chocolate, or something? (Or did I miss a bunch of fics? Does anyone have links? I'd be forever grateful! *bigeyes*)

~*~*~*~*~*~

Clark groaned as he tried to sit up.

He was dead tired, hurting, and freezing cold -- he could barely feel his fingers. ...or any of his extremities at all. He remembered, he'd felt this way before. Powerless.

This was not good. He was in the middle of the arctic with no super-strength, or invincibility, or endurance against the cold. Or speed to get him out of here.

He remembered how far away civilization had been from the Fortress when Chloe had needed medical attention. Not good at all. He needed to get moving. Now.

He managed to roll over and lever himself upright, and brought an arm up in front of his face to try and shield himself against the frigid, biting wind that was blowing snow into his face. He could barely see his arm in front of him.

Then his eyes widened as he realized that it wasn't his red jacket sleeve he was seeing in his field of vision, but Lex's dark coat sleeve and one of his gloves.

"Lex?" Clark whispered. He raised his head and twisted in place, trying futilely to scan his surroundings once again.

"Lex?!?" Clark yelled as loudly as he could, but the wind immediately tore the sound away from him, drowning it out with its own howling roar.

He started to panic, realizing that there was no way Lex would survive without his winter gear -- why had Lex taken it off in the first place, let alone put it on him? Where was he? Clark tried to search around, but being unable to get off of his hands and knees in the raging storm weather, and with such low visibility, he couldn't find any sign of Lex or the Fortress anywhere near him.

Clark huddled down in on himself and hugged his arms around his chest. This was wrong. He didn't know what the controlling crystal was supposed to have done -- everyone said it was supposed to allow the user to control him, but what exactly did that mean? -- but Clark was pretty sure that it shouldn't have hurt Lex, or done anything to him at all. The beam had only hit Clark.

Had Lex gotten caught in the collapsing Fortress? --But that didn't make sense, he'd been right beside Clark and had stayed with him until Clark had blacked out. Whatever the Orb had done to him had hurt like hell -- the beam had left behind an oscillating pain that had radiated outwards in waves from where he'd been zapped in the chest. It had gotten worse and worse until Clark had felt like he was being ripped in half, and that had been when everything had gone dark.

The only other explanation Clark could think of was that Lex had survived, too, decided to drag Clark far enough away from the shattered Fortress to a place where there were no crystal shards littering the landscape, and left him there for whatever reason. But where was he now, and why had he decided to leave Clark here?

Clark whimpered and he shivered uncontrollably as he got colder and colder. His teeth chattered, and the cold was beginning to hurt worse than Kryptonite radiation ever had, unbelievably.

So Clark tried and failed to stand several times in the middle of the raging snowstorm, until he was nearly too tired to move. He collapsed, laid out flat in the snow, and stared at the flakes whipping wildly around and about him for far too long. Then, with a sheer effort of will, he shoved himself back to his knees and started frantically digging down into the snow around him, as fast as he was still able to.

Lex's gloves saved him, dark against the white so he could see what he could no longer feel -- too cold now to be anything but numb -- and keeping his hands from becoming life-threateningly damaged against the hard-packed snow. He slowly built himself a shelter around him, raising the walls inch by inch. Once he had somewhat of a windbreak, he huddled down even further, keeping himself out of the wind and minimizing his exposure to the elements as much as possible. He slowly dug himself in deeper and deeper, piling up the walls higher and higher until it started to resemble an igloo, leaving himself only a small gap for air flow, so very cold as it whistled by. Each breath was like knives down his throat, but he didn't dare stop.

Finally he could no longer force his limbs to move. He collapsed completely, fatigued beyond his body's capacity to save itself, even if he'd been able to produce a further surge of adrenaline to help drive him. He barely had the presence of mind to pull the hood farther down over his head to cover his face a little better, and tucked his arms in under his hood, supporting himself so that he didn't fall asleep with his head in the snow -- knowing that, powerless as he seemed to be, he'd never wake up again if he did that.

He prayed that Lex was ok.

...Maybe he would see the makeshift shelter and come back? It was safer here than out there.

Unless Lex had left him behind to die.

Clark whimpered softly, curled in on himself, and closed his eyes.

~*~*~*~*~*~

"--or. --th--. M---"

Clark was so tired. Everything felt heavy, even his eyelids. He couldn't move, and he wasn't sure he even wanted to try to do so.

"--Luthor? Mr.--"

What? Lex was here? Clark struggled to wake, to move against the heaviness in his limbs. He wanted to see Lex, to be sure he was ok.

 _Lex must have gone for help!_ Clark suddenly realized as he slowly began to become aware of the distinct lack of the feel of cold snow and biting, frigid wind. He was fairly sure he was no longer in his makeshift shelter of packed snow -- it felt cold, but still too warm for that -- so someone must have found and retrieved him for Lex. But Lex wouldn't leave the retrieval of an alien he considered possibly dangerous to only some nameless subordinate, Clark was almost certain. Not even a depowered one. And no-one would have left him unrestrained, powerless or not, and it didn't feel like there was anything external weighing him down.  ...So where was he? What was going on? And why couldn't he hear Lex?

Clark was startled as suddenly the heavy feeling left his eyelids and he blinked open his eyes. A redheaded woman was looking down on him from overhead, and the world spun uneasily. When things settled again, he realized he was upright, clutching tightly at the side of the...cot. He was on a cot in a tent.

"Mr. Luthor? Lex?"

His vision swam in and out for a moment, and Clark felt very weird as he quickly passed a hand over his eyes. He'd never had issues with seeing before, when he was depowered after everything with Zod. And something felt different, like he couldn't focus properly.

He turned his head up towards the woman, and felt tense, like... like something wasn't quite meshing up. His control was way off, and when he tried to move everything felt too sluggish, or too heavy, and then too light, and sometimes almost all at once. His breathing felt almost erratic; it felt like he couldn't take a deep breath as fully as he should be able to, somehow.

And where was Lex? He wasn't here, and the woman had been calling for him, hadn't she? Why wasn't he here yet?

"Ms. Mercer. Report," he heard raspily, and Clark realized with no small shock that the words had come _from his own mouth_.

"Sir. I- We were worried about your safety. After the zero hour, as you requested, search and rescue teams were dispatched. We found you in a small ice shelter, but thus far there has been no sign of the plane you arrived on, or its crew. We are still searching the area for signs of the original cause of electromagnetic disturbance, but nothing so far."

Clark watched as his vision -- what he could see -- darted back and forth, felt as his hands reached up and took a cup of water from the woman. Felt it go down his throat, felt something ease.

"An ice shelter?" soft enough to be a mere echo, but that voice... smoother now...

Oh god. Clark recognized that voice.

"Did you find anyone else?" he said.

"No, sir."

Clark felt his forehead furrow in a frown, felt a gloved hand reach up and glide over his head without resistance -- a hairless skull.

Clark would have shivered, but he couldn't move. Would have screamed, but he couldn't make his throat work _because it wasn't his throat, now, was it?_

Denial warred with sense that was switfly overwhelmed by pure panic and mental flailing to hold onto _something, **anything** \--_

"No... body? No sign of another person?"

"I'm sorry, sir. We haven't finished searching the area-- but we'll find anything if it exists here, we'll scour the area, sir!" the woman promised fervently.

But Clark barely heard her, because he was realizing that he was dead. He was dead, or as good as dead -- he was dead, he was a Phantom, a ghost, _Lex had done this to him, Lex had **killed** him and he had no body and no body to go back to and he was stuck and he had no control and **he was dead**_ \--

He needed to scream but he couldn't scream, and then he felt unmoored like something had come loose and he clawed and grasped at nothing as everything started to spiral away from him -- taste, smell, hearing, touch, sight -- but there was nothing to grab onto, nothing to slow his fall as he fell and fell and fell down into black, worse than his worst fear of heights, worse than Jor-El and the summer in the caves, worse than _anything_ that came before because he couldn't even feel the hammering of his heart, the catch of his breath, because he didn't have that anymore, he didn't have a body anymore and he needed to _scream--_

~*~*~*~*~*~

Clark... drifted for awhile.

Except it wasn't drifting, because drifting was a feeling and he didn't have those anymore, feelings were a body thing, not a mind thing.

He didn't-drift in darkness that wasn't really darkness, because darkness was sight when you weren't seeing anything and he didn't even have that anymore, either.

So he didn't-drift in not-darkness and he had no concept of the passage of time, not that it really mattered anymore, because he was really and truly dead this time -- no Scarecrow Field with an empty grey sky, no rows of corn, no oppressive breeze, no nothing. All he had was time.

It was just Clark and his thoughts, and Clark _was_ his thoughts, that was _all_ he was anymore.

He wasn't sure when the panic started to go away. There hadn't really been anything to stop it, no way to calm down, and he vaguely realized now that maybe being able to force himself to calm down, back when he was alive, had had something to do with the feel of his own body -- being able to feel the speed up of his heart, the panted breaths, and realize that he needed to stop, to try and back off and undo whatever he was doing. That there was a physical limit to his panic.

But when he was all-thought, well, there weren't really any limits anymore, were there?

At least he didn't have to worry about breaking things anymore. Except himself.

Clark didn't know how long he'd panicked for, or even how badly exactly; things had gotten to be really bad for awhile there, and he had a vague notion that maybe he didn't quite remember it all properly. He was pretty sure that he didn't want to remember it properly. Kind of like whatever had happened with Jor-El and the brainwashing in the caves into the soldier-Kal-El-him.

Clark wondered if it had been like this for Cyrus Krupp, if maybe this was why he'd gone comatose and ended up hidden deep inside his own head. Maybe what had happened to him had been similar, except that in Cyrus's case his brain had just stopped listening to his body, and the panic had gotten so deep and circling, gotten too close to some point of no return that his mind and sanity had ended up spiraling down in on itself like water down a drain, like tying a knot into itself farther and farther and tighter and tighter...

Cyrus hadn't been able to heal himself, but Clark tended to heal pretty quickly. Or his body had used to. Maybe his mind did, too, given enough time.

Clark wasn't sure he cared. He felt detached; if he was still capable of really feeling anything at all, that was what it was: detached.

After awhile, he felt like he could move his thoughts around this place that wasn't really a place, a place without landmarks or walls, although somehow he had a sense that it was contained, not endless, but somehow actually cramped: not small, but not large, either. Not comfortable, not roomy. He could expand out and give himself 'space' to think, or spiral his thoughts in tight, weaving them together like a tight thread or a braid.

He drifted without drifting in a place where he couldn't feel anything to care, and wondered if he would ever know peace, because his thoughts would not settle or still, they just ran about restlessly, never ceasing...

Clark was his thoughts. If his thoughts never stopped, would he never die? Would he be stuck like this? Forever?

~*~*~*~*~*~

Clark's eyes snapped open as physical _feeling_ **slammed** into him with a furious overwhelming combination of _hot-cold-pressure-smooth-rough-heavy, muscles-fighting-pull-of-gravity, breath-in-through-the-nose-filling-lungs, shift of arms and legs against rough cheap cotton--_

Spots danced in his vision before it cleared to a dark room and a normal-sized, sheet-covered bed.

Clark shoved himself upright in a flash, panting, thinking oh thank god, it was just a nightmare!

...until he looked around and realized where he was... or rather, wasn't. And then looked down at himself and realized this _wasn't_ himself, wasn't his body. All over again.

Clark moaned in utter desolate grief.

He stared down at hands that were thin and marked by odd calluses. A pianist's hands, a chemist's hands, an artist's hands; hands worn by corporate work, instead of what might be otherwise expected.

Clark wrapped Lex's arms around Lex's torso and hugged himself. Sort-of. He curled forward and started to rock, then shivered as the sheets slithered off of him and pooled around his -- Lex's -- waist and as he grabbed at them, he glanced over to his right--

There was somebody else in bed with him.

Oh, god. Lex had been sleeping with somebody. Some woman. Some stupid Lex girl. He was supposed to know better by now. Clark thought he had knew better, now.

Lex had had sex with this random person, and now Clark was in control of Lex's body, sitting in bed next to her.

Clark felt ill.

He got up slowly in the moonlight, finding shoes and socks and pants and shirt slowly, carefully, quietly. He did _not_ want to wake her up. Whoever the hell she was. He _absolutely_ did not want to know whatever she and Lex had done. He winced at forming bruises and a throbbing in his -- Lex's -- head.

Then Clark started as he heard a door creak, the noise coming from the other side of the closed bedroom door. Angry voices. Male.

Quiet, subdued angry voices.

 _Oh, shit._ Clark knew how these sorts of things ended for Lex. _Stupid, stupid, stupid!_ he mentally berated his ex-friend, murderer, now-jailer.

Clark dressed hurriedly, glanced around, feeling a wholly-physical panic churning upwards from the region of Lex's gut. His eyes finally settled on the window, and he bolted over, checking it.

_Thank god. Fire escape._

He heard the bedroom door slam open behind him and didn't waste time looking back -- he just slammed the window open and shoved Lex's body through, then barreled down the fire escape to a chorus of no longer quiet yells and...

Gunshots.

Clark, thoroughly pissed off now, dodged, ducked, and weaved as he somehow managed to maneuver Lex's body down the rusting ladder, across the alleyway, and out into the main street without getting anyone killed. He realized as he broke out onto the larger roadway that (a) he was in Metropolis and (b) he was in a really _bad_ part of Metropolis, judging from the hookers and drug dealers about.

Who were staring at him with open interest.

Forget subtlety and fuck Lex's reputation -- Clark ran.

Clark ran and ran until he thought Lex's lungs would give out, and then he ran some more. He ran past the point he thought Lex's _legs_ would give out, and finally let himself slow on purpose once he'd reached a part of town where cops might actually even consider coming out if there was a 911 call logged by dispatch from the area.

He searched and searched, moving at a brisk walk, until he found a taxicab. It took him five tries and three different cars before he was finally successful in flagging one down.

"Luthor Towers," he told the cabbie, and, breathing heavily, collapsed back in the seat.

Clark felt awful -- or rather, Lex's body did -- but it wasn't _awful_ awful. Not like Kryptonite, or getting stabbed, or anything like that. The running had been pretty nasty, though. Clark now understood first-hand what it meant to 'have a stitch in your side', and all sorts of aches and pains were making themselves known as what must have been actual 100% human adrenaline began to wear off.

Luckily, Lex had left his wallet in the back pocket of his pants, and Clark paid the cabbie a huge tip like Lex probably would... if he used cabs.

Clark wondered for a moment where Lex had parked his car back there, and then he decided he didn't care. It wasn't like Lex couldn't afford another car, or needed another one to add to the dozen.

Clark forced himself upright, slamming the car door behind him. He stared up at the Towers before taking a deep breath (well, deep for _Lex_ , which he was finding was a lot different than him, in a lot of ways) and striding in through the sliding doors. He walked up to the elevator, slapped the button for up with his palm, and hit the 'P' button nearly as hard once inside.

He was fuming by the time he let himself into Lex's penthouse apartment. What the hell had Lex been thinking?

Clark slammed the door behind him, and started stripping off clothes as he made a beeline for the nearest bathroom. He wanted a shower. Get the stink of the girl-whore and panicked flight and the streets and the cab off of him. He'd never felt so... unclean.

...And what the hell had _he_ been thinking? He'd been stuck rescuing Lex, _again_.

 _I can't win,_ Clark thought hysterically, bracing himself against the sink as he stared into the mirror at Lex. _I'm still having to rescue Lex even after I'm dead._ Then he started as what he was seeing finally registered through the fatigue and the frustrated anger, and he got a really good look at Lex's body.

Lex was... emaciated. His eyes were dark hollows. He looked half skin and bones.

 _What the hell?_ Clark thought, reaching out a hand and touching the mirror, skimming the surface with fingertips, cool and smooth to the touch.

This wasn't right -- Lex had always been a bit on the lean side, but he'd been fit. Muscular. Not... this.

"What have you been doing to yourself?" Clark whispered in Lex's voice, horrified beyond belief.

Then he grimaced and backed away from the image, shaking his head once. He turned away and got into the shower, stripped down completely, and started scrubbing.

 _You don't care,_ Clark reminded himself. _You don't care, he's not your friend anymore, he **killed** you, for god's sake, and locked you up in his own body. Whatever it is, it's his own damn fault, and nothing to do with you. He can clean up his own damn messes for once._

He finally finished scrubbing away the filth under good water and clean-smelling soap, and stepped out and dried Lex's body off with a towel.

Clark glared at the mirror again as he walked to the door. Then he stopped, looked back, and stared again.

 _Maybe Lex doesn't know I'm in here,_ it occurred to him. _Maybe if I told him... maybe..._ Then Clark realized how ludicrous that really was and shook his head over and over again in an attempt to physically rid himself of the thought. So Clark had saved Lex's life again tonight, even after Lex had killed his body and imprisoned him inside his own; so what? If Lex did know, then he either didn't care or had done it on purpose. If he didn't know, he'd either find a way to exorcise Clark to the Phantom Zone, or similar. Lex wouldn't feel like he 'owed him one'. Lex wouldn't do anything to help him. Lex had tried to kill him, and only managed partway.

Lex didn't like doing things in half-measures.

Clark wasn't sure yet if even this quarter-life and twilight-death was better than nothing.

Clark shivered, then grimaced and went hunting for clean underwear and pajamas.

He ended up settling down on the couch in the living room -- Lex's body _was_ feeling pretty horrible, and Clark wasn't so sure anymore  -- now that he'd gotten a good look at Lex -- whether Kryptonite-in-his-own-body-horrible was any good gauge to use against human-level horribleness. He did have the sinking feeling that once he fell asleep, he'd lose control of Lex's body again -- whatever small amount he must have at the moment -- and go back to being nothing but thoughts in that un-place of not-darkness again. Which meant that Lex would be the one to wake up. If Clark went to bed, and Lex slept in his room, no-one might bother him and see to care. But if Clark camped out on the couch out here, whoever did Lex's cooking and cleaning for him in the penthouse suite would see the state of Lex's body and react accordingly.

It occurred to Clark that while he didn't know how long he'd been out, he could easily check by grabbing a newspaper, or just turning on the TV and checking the date. But he realized that, well... he really didn't want to know. He just as easily discarded the notion of trying to contact the League -- Lex would have the phone call on his outgoing call record, and no-one in the League would believe him, anyway; they'd just think it was some game of Luthor's and freak the fuck out at what 'Lex' knew and kill themselves trying to figure out how 'Lex' knew it. Paranoia was a real bitch, sometimes. ...And even if he could convince them, it wasn't like they could do anything for him anyway, what with him being dead and all and only haunting Lex from time to time, in some weird form of random possession. He wasn't even sure where he was a Phantom anymore, because if that really was the case then shouldn't he ought to have more control, like all the other Phantom Kryptonians did? --Either way, he'd just be upsetting people unnecessarily; no good could come of it.

Clark yawned as he settled in on the couch with a pillow and blanket, and hoped that his real body really was dead, or gone, or whatever, because he hated the idea of Lex and that red-haired Mercer woman getting their hands on it and doing alien autopsy things with Kryptonite and lots of sharp knives. He might not be inhabiting it anymore, but it was still _his._

As Clark relaxed into the cushions and let Lex's eyelids flutter shut, Clark vaguely wondered if he was wrong -- maybe he really was going to be the one to wake up in the morning, and Lex would be the one set drifting instead. He wasn't sure he cared at this point -- the fatigue of his earlier exertion of will upon and within Lex's less-than-well-kept body had gotten to him far too quickly to fight against.

Clark drifted off to an almost-pleasant slumber, and when his mental grip on Lex's body loosened he slowly slipped back into the darkness-that-wasn't. But this time, when his thoughts drifted off, they settled into dreams. Dreams in a neutral grey, if dreams could have color when a mind had no body to visualize them for the imagination's benefit, but dreams they were, nonetheless.

Clark slept.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex gasped awake, flailing. His head was pounding and every last inch of him ached.

"Sir!"

Lex clenched down on a whimper of pain, baring his teeth and nearly jackknifing in bed. Slowly, numbness crept in, as Tess murmured to him about the morphine drip and apologies about not being able to give him a higher dose.

"Fuck," Lex breathed out, when the ain was finally medicated down to something manageable. "What the hell happened, Mercy?" he asked, turning his head and squinting his eyes at the glare from the hopsital's fluorescent lights, trying not to wince.

God, he loved his sociopathic half-sister, all-unknowingly so. She dimmed the overhead lights without his even having to ask.

"It was a triple-cross," she reported grimly. "That woman--"

"Drugged me, tossed me, and didn't hand me over to the right bad people to be caught red-handed," Lex hissed out. "I know. Just tell me that you got both groups."

Tess glanced away and swallowed nervously. That wasn't a good sign. That was a tell of incompetent work. Damnit. He hadn't wanted to use himself as bait, but the subversive elements that Lionel had let weasel their way into LuthorCorp to rot it from the inside out had needed rooting out long since, and Edge's old network would not have moved for any lesser prize. And if his reading of Tess' reactions was anywhere close to the mark, it had been the worst outcome: the group they had known about hadn't done anything to allow even partial identification of its members for a quasi-legal detainment, and this unknown second group that they hadn't previously been aware of had somehow not only managed to grab him but had also slipped the net.

"How much did you have to pay for my safe return?" Lex asked, closing his eyes in mental pain as he feared the answer, especially if the coin used had not been of a monetary sort.

A short pause became an uncomfortably long pause. Lex slowly opened his eyes and looked up at Tess.

Tess looked... confused.

"What is it?" Lex asked.

"Sir..." Tess said slowly, carefully. "We didn't have to pay anything at all. You escaped yourself."

Lex stared at her incredulously. " _...What?_ " he asked, feeling a sick dread as he slowly pushed himself upright to stare at her more fully. He didn't remember escaping. From his recollection, he'd been hit from behind, then woken up here.

"You surprised everyone. You just walked in the door at half-past midnight last night, went straight up to the Penthouse, cleaned up, and went to sleep in the living room."

"...The living room?" Lex echoed, feeling struck dumb.

"You collapsed on the couch. You didn't even try to contact anyone to tell them you were all right. We only found out that you'd returned the next morning when the cleaning maid saw you lying there, and we backtracked your movements from the security tapes." She frowned. "Actually, you didn't follow any of the protocols at all..."

"I want to see those tapes," Lex demanded softly in a voice of steel, feeling a disquiet he hadn't felt since... no. No. No, this was not _that_. There was an explanation. A different explanation. Not that. It wasn't that. It couldn't be. He knew more now than he had then, and none of the other proper _known_ warning signs were there. He had no reason to feel so... unnerved.

"Yes, sir," Tess affirmed quickly, standing to leave and immediately track down for him the data necessary to accommodate his need for more information. Even if that information was about himself.

The door to the hospital room opened. "Mr. Luthor?" one of his doctors said tentatively. Lex waved him in, but he only just stepped inside, keeping so near the exit that Tess was barely able to get through the doorway past him. He closed it with great reluctance.

He looked very, very pale.

"Out with it," Lex very nearly growled. This was one of his own set, one with a very high-level clearance, and whatever it was that was wrong, standing there and _not_ telling Lex was not going to magically make things any better somehow. Lex needed information to be able to assess, plan, and react effectively. He needed to stay calm and give himself the time and breathing space to think things through, _and this idiot was not helping_.

"Ah, well, sir, you see, with your kidnapping and your hospital stay, we ran more than the usual battery of tests on your bloodwork." He paused. "The... the _full_ battery of tests."

"And?" Lex prompted, about to lose his temper. He'd rather have the bad news sooner than later, especially if it related to his personal health.

"And we found low levels of -- well, just traces, really! it's probably nothing serious--" the man stammered, trying to sound cheery but failing miserably.

"Traces. Of. What." Lex gritted out, a moment away from forcing himself out of his hospital bed and strangling the man.

"Of-- of alien peptides similar to the ones we retrieved from the corpse at Fort Ryan, but... but they most closely resembled the ones documented as being found in the blood sample of subject 7805, the Quebec boy, the subject who had been inhabited by the, the," the doctor swallowed heavily, inching backwards towards the door.

"The Kryptonian entity," Lex finished in a monotone, feeling an impending sense of doom.

Lex took it all back. Now was an _excellent_ time to panic.

~*~*~*~*~*~

 _To hell with all of this -- for once in my life, I am getting some damn answers!_ Lex seethed with rage.

He slammed the door shut on his convertible and stomped towards the barn, his fists clenching and unclenching at his sides.

When he got to the barn door, he grabbed the handle and slid it open so hard that the "bang!" sounded like a gunshot as he nearly forced it off its track.

 _"KENT!"_ he bellowed, stomping in, teeth bared and longcoat billowing out behind him.

Lex heard the casual, heavy thump of boots from one of the horse stalls, and out strolled Clark Kent.

Lex damn near saw red when he saw the look of boredom on Kent's face. He mentally stuttered incoherently for a good thirty seconds at least, standing stock still like a statue carved from a rare marble shot through with darkness and hate.

"Was there something you wanted, Luthor? I'm busy," Clark drawled.

That did it. Lex marched over.

"You son of a bitch--!" Lex started.

"We talking about my adopted or biological parents? Or both? Just to be clear, you understand," Clark interrupted casually, and just as casually _turned his back on Lex_ and proceeded to go back to brushing down the brood mare's coat in the horse stall with the currycomb he was holding.

That had Lex nearly sputtering all over again, because Mrs. Kent--

Lex grabbed Clark from behind, fisting two hands in his shirt, and slamming him sideways into the wall of the stall. _"Look at me when I'm talking to you, you damn alien menace!"_ he screeched.

"Fuck you," Clark laughed easily, with a slowly-growing grin. "The only 'alien' around here is you."

"What the hell do you know?!?" Lex demanded, going dead-white, his eyes widening as he reeled backwards in shock. _How could he know?_ was soon replaced with _What did Clark do to me?_

But Clark just laughed, and the fear was overpowered as the the anger flooded right back in again, and Lex, fed up, grabbed him again and shoved him out of the stall. Clark stumbled and fell, but then smiled thinly and picked himself up, brushed himself off deliberate-slow while watching Lex. Looking like it was taking him some effort not to laugh. Like it was all some big funny _joke_.

"You suddenly show up after being missing for a month at the same time as-- as--" Lex clenched his teeth, old habits finally kicking in as they never had with Clark before and being completely unwilling to give more information than he had to. "You expect me to believe that you had nothing to do with it? _What the hell did you do???_ " he hissed, advancing on Clark again.

Clark's smile widened into a grin. "I wandered through a snowstorm, got myself picked up and sold as slave labor to some really smelly Russians, and eventually got rescued by the League. Next question?"

Lex didn't believe a word of it. "Do you think I'm fucking _stupid?!_ " Lex tossed out, irate, his voice rising through octaves, his control slipping even further.

"Yes!" Clark replied simply. Then he easily dodged Lex's barefisted swing at his head with an easy sidestep, letting out another peal of laughter again.

"Oh, come on, Lex," Clark taunted smoothly. "You've always said that you wanted no lies, just the truth, and when I actually _give_ it to you, unvarnished and whole, you get all _angry_ with me. How _childish_."

"You're not telling the truth; you're lying. You're still lying! Keeping things from me!" Lex spat out.

Clark's grin widened further, nearly becoming a death-head's grin. "Oh, no I'm not. Hell, I'll even make you a deal, Lex. No, even better -- a promise!" His eyes glittered with mischief and something else. Something that would have given Lex pause if his anger hadn't been completely overriding his good judgment just then. "I _promise_ to answer every question that you ask, and to always tell you the truth. _Even when you beg me not to,_ " he ended, his tone as smooth as the caress of a sharp blade slicing through someone's jugular. " _Especially_ then."

Lex was shaking and he couldn't stop. He wanted to tear Clark to shreds. Instead, he settled for reaching in a pocket, pulling a huge chunk of meteor rock out of a lead-lined pouch, and tossing it at Clark's head. Hard.

Clark reached up and caught it, one-handed. He smiled all over again.

Lex's jaw dropped.

Clark snickered and tossed it up and down in one hand, casually. "Very stupid, indeed. You shouldn't carry this around with you, Lex. It'll make you sick. Or worse." Clark went back to his thin, knowing smile. Lex found himself wanting to slice it off his face.

When Clark threw the rock underhand right back to him, Lex caught it but almost fumbled it, mind reeling, because Clark really was showing no Kryptonian-poisoning symptoms at all. He ended up dropping it back into his pocket, thoughtlessly.

"How?" he asked finally.

"I'm not an alien," Clark shrugged.

"The Orb-- it worked against you," Lex accused.

"More like worked _for_ me. Thanks for that, by the way," Clark smirked.

"--You lying son of a bitch!" Lex yelled out again. If there was one thing Lex hated, it was being _used_ and the thought that the Orb had made Clark immune somehow to the one thing that could bring him down, and tha Lex had been tricked into using it on him, thinking it was a weapon that could bring him under _control_ instead--

"Now-now, Lex. Not lying. Truthful! I thought we went over this earlier," Clark tsked.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" Lex demanded. "Who the hell are you?" came next, and he realized all at once that this _wasn't_ Clark, couldn't be Clark. _This is some sort of imposter, somehow,_ and as the thought occurred to him, the feeling grew stronger and stronger. This wasn't Clark. _This isn't Clark. Where the hell is Clark?_

"I'm Clark Kent, can't you tell?" he grinned quickly. "Oh no, I take it back -- I guess you wouldn't be able to, now, would you?"

 _This is probably what insanity feels like,_ Lex realized as he pressed his palms against his temples, hard. "You were at the Fortress," he accused.

"Yes."

"You were affected by the Orb."

"Oh, yes."

"You have to do what I say."

A laugh. "Nope!" the imposter shot back, grinning. "Whatever gave you that idea?"

"You're Kal-El!"

"Wrong again!" He crossed his arms, then cocked his head. "You're pretty bad at this, aren't you?"

" ** _Stop lying to me!_** " Lex hissed, and he reached into his coat, pulled out a handgun, and aimed it at Clark's head.

Clark smiled. "I'm not lying," he said evenly, not changing his pose.

"I don't care if you're fucking bulletproof, I will find a way to--" Lex started shakily, remembering the last fight he had in the barn. Remembering the awl, bent. Remembering the rebar in the lower caves, sticking out of Clark's arm... and the meteor rock dust. Remembering the 'snick!' of the lead-and-meteor-rock bullets as he had shoved them into into the clip of the gun he was pointing at Clark's head. Remembering how little Clark had been affected by the meteor rock just prior, if he'd been affected at all.

"Not bulletproof," Clark interrupted casually.

Lex blinked. "Fucking hell," he whispered. Then he felt calmer, as he straightened out his arm to full extension, and cocked the gun to a hair-trigger.

Clark looked almost amused. He shrugged and said, "You're not going to pull the trigger."

"The hell I'm not," Lex said, feeling a little braver now that he wasn't up against an invincible alien. At least, assuming that the imposter wasn't lying about the lack of invulnerability...

"Nope, not gonna do it," Clark said confidently, dropping his hands down to his waist and looping his thumbs in the beltloops of his jeans.

Lex stared in astonishment as Clark walked forward, then right past him, and back to the horse stall, completely unconcerned.

"You-- you--" Lex sputtered. "I _will_ shoot you!" he said tightly, spinning around and aiming the gun at him again, wondering what the hell was wrong with him. Was the man insane?

"No, you won't," Clark rejoined, as he strode forward and picked right back up with his work in the horse stall. "If you shoot me, you can't ask me questions and you'll never get your answers. You'd even be giving up the ability to ever 'win' over me," he added as almost an afterthought as he picked up a pitchfork out of a bale of hay. "Which means you'll lose, and you hate losing. And, with humanity at stake..." Clark looked at him sideways, "I know you. You'll not dare to do anything to risk it." He smiled slightly, then turned back to the stall and tossing down new hay.

Lex was confused as hell, because that couldn't possibly be right. And, besides, "You're not Clark Kent. I have no compunction to hold back with you," he ended grimly. "You will answer my questions truthfully, or I will shoot you, and it won't be fatal until I'm satisfied."

"Oh please, as if you ever held back before," Clark scoffed. "Pay attention, Lex," he said snidely, and with that he whipped up the pitchfork and slashed Lex's hand with the manure-encrusted tines.

Lex shouted and lost hold of the gun, which spun off into a mess of tractor parts near the walls. He clutched desperately at his left wrist, in horrendous pain where the tines had sliced him across his hand.

Clark promptly shoved the pitchfork into the bale of hay again, stepped forward, and punched Lex in the gut. Hard.

Lex folded and went down, sprawling backwards a good yard and a half from the blow.

Wheezing, Lex tucked his left hand in towards his chest and tried to shove himself upright, but found himself unable to do much more than lever himself up a little bit onto one arm. He shivered against the ground and curled inward subconsciously as the fake Clark approached and towered over him.

He'd never been so scared in his life. Clark had never-- not with physical violence, not like this. Not with a _weapon_. Never. This _wasn't_ Clark.

Lex looked straight up into cold green eyes and _knew_ down to his bones that this man wasn't Clark. He'd never seen him before in his life.

"You just couldn't do it, could you," the not-Clark talked down at him condescendingly, chatting almost ambivalently. "You couldn't just walk in and ask, 'Are you a Kryptonian?' and just listen. You couldn't say, 'I have a problem,' or 'I need information on those aliens I've been fighting,' or 'I don't understand what's really been happening all these years, could you please tell me what you know so that when I go out there I can maybe not get myself killed doing something unbelievably stupid?' Hell, I bet 'please' left your vocabulary a long time ago, didn't it?" The bastard sounded almost _amused_.

"You've played me for a fool," Lex whispered.

"Today?" the man laughed. "Oh, yes. But before?" He leaned down. "Never." He was smiling again. "Oh, go on, ask me. It's ok. We both know you want to."

"Where's Clark?" Lex asked shakily.

"Right here," the imposter grinned. "You just can't see it right now," he added, with that death-head's grin again.

"You're not Clark," Lex repeated, shuddering.

Pause and a deepening smile, and Lex suddenly realized he'd missed something important.

"Yes, I am," the imposter repeated. "You just never got to know the real me. Not that it was your fault, mind you," he added breezily.

"I'm going to kill you," Lex promised quietly.

"No. You won't." And with that, the imposter squatted down to near eye-level with Lex, where he lay half-sprawled in the dirt and the dust and the muck of the barn floor. "If you even try to lay one finger on me again, the League will know. And Green Arrow will kill you, if I don't first." He looked Lex right in the eye and smiled.

Lex shivered.

"But we won't have to worry about that, now will we? Because the next time you come by, and the next time, and the time after that -- _every_ time after that -- you are going to be kind and courteous and above all _polite_. You will ask _nicely_ and I will answer truthfully, just like I promised, and we'll both get along so swimmingly." Clark stood up, and snagged the pitchfork from the haybale again, and twirled it absently. "And as a show of good faith, I'll even answer a question for you that you don't even know enough to ask." He glanced back over his shoulder, down at Lex, and his smile grew sharp. "When you used the Orb, it did _exactly_ what you wanted it to do."

And then Clark Kent turned, balanced his pitchfork over his shoulder, and walked out of the barn, laughing.

"Don't forget to clean out that wound, Luthor!" Lex heard through the ringing laughter, tossed back at him like a parting slap, "Manure can be a bitch on the immune system!"

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex staggered out of the barn some time later. He wasn't sure how long it had taken him. He'd collapsed twice.

He'd been thoroughly unprepared. He shouldn't have come alone. He should have--

Shivering even harder, Lex fell to his knees next to his car. He bit his lip, curled his arms around himself, and rode out the shudders as they grew worse, then finally lessened. He felt weak.

A sheen of sweat layered across his face and forehead. He realized what a mistake it had been, coming out here so soon when he had barely gotten himself out of the hospital. When he hadn't even had an idea yet for how to handle the threatening alien presence hidden somewhere within him. He'd just grabbed the nearest meteor rock sample he could find in convenient packaging, stuffed it in a pocket, snagged his guns from hospital security, and headed for a confrontation at the Kent farm.

 _I wasn't thinking,_ he realized. _I was panicked and alone and I turned to Clark like I know better than to do anymore. Ever. That I know better than to ever do, ever again._ But a small traitorous part of him whispered, _But he's always helped you before. Even after everything._

 _Then why is it different now?_ He struggled with the thought. He'd done worse. Much worse. Before. And he hadn't lost Clark. Not completely. Not even then. Much, much worse. ...Hadn't he? Clark had never... he'd never really given up on him before. Not really.

_But that wasn't Clark._

_I just need to find Clark,_ he thought shakily. _Everything will be all right if I can just..._

And with that half-formed thought, Lex managed to get himself upright and into his car, start the engine, and drive off.

He made it a good half-mile down the highway before he became so dizzy, the sickening pain so intense and him feeling so weak, that he lost control of the vehicle and ran off the road.

~*~*~*~*~*~

When Lex woke up later, he was in his bed at the mansion, clean and in fresh clothes, with his hand carefully bandaged and feeling like it had been cleansed and treated. And in a house silent as death because all the staff was back at the penthouse in Metropolis, knowing that there was no-one else there to have cared for him or to hear him now, Lex curled up into a ball and screamed for an hour and a half.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Clark shoved at the airbag and tried not to curse.

He fumbled at the car door and stumbled out, lost his footing, and went down in the grass-and-dirt embankment.

He turned over and lay there, on his back, arms and legs splayed out from his sides, for a couple minutes, just breathing.

Then he groaned, opened his eyes and slowly pushed himself to a seated position, glaring at the car.

As it turned out, it was the same car that Lex had crashed the previous time Clark had woken up.

At least this time Lex's hand wasn't shredded, but his neck felt like murder. Clark massaged it carefully with a hand and glared at the offending vehicle as he got himself upright. Last time, Lex had 'merely' drifted off the road and down into a shallow enbankment. Clark had woken up to an incredibly ill feeling, and a huge chunk of glowing meteor rock in Lex's pocket. Clark had been half-sure that Lex had been in the process of being mutated into a really horrible meteor-freak when Clark had gained control again, and if he'd managed to throw the rock away before it was too late then Lex _really_ owed him one, this time.

Oh, and he'd lost Lex's lunch on the side of the road afterwards. Lex really, really owed him one. Throwing up was terrible and gross.

But transporting that exposed meteor-rock? On his person? With no lead shielding? Lex should've known better. He did know better. Idiot.

This time didn't looke like an accident at all, though. The poor car was half-embedded in a tree, straight-on aligned with the driver's side. You didn't hit a tree straight on like that if you had any control at all... unless you were actively trying to. Idiot. Why the hell had Lex done it? On purpose, and so soon after the last time? Because, given the bandages still on Lex's hand, it couldn't have been long since the _last_ car accident. Maybe a day or two, if that.

He would've glared at Lex instead of the car, because he doubted it wasn't driver error being the real problem here this time. Unfortunately, that would've involved tilting his head at an odd angle at the side view mirrors, and Lex's neck ached enough as it was. Clark wasn't exactly anxious to find out how bad it would feel after torquing it around a whole bunch more.

Clark looked over the car, looked around, considered his options. He looked up at the clear blue sky and implored the heavens for strength and patience he was pretty sure he didn't have. It didn't really help. He looked back down at the car and sighed. Then he moved around to the front and shoved hard against the grill with his shoulder, putting Lex's whole body into it.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Tess watched, fascinated, as Lex didn't look for a cellphone, curse, or do anything remotely Lex-like at all.

Instead, she watched as he slowly extracted the car from the tree and, once free, popped open the hood.

After fifteen minutes of fiddling around inside it, he slammed it shut, wiped his hands on a handkerchief as he walked around to the front of the car, and got back in.

Then he fumbled around in the interior of the car for a minute, before he finished whatever he was doing, started the car, backed up carefully and somehow managed to drive the car back up onto the roadway, and peeled off.

_Son of a bitch!_

Tess dropped the binoculars around her neck, scrambled down out of the tree, and made a mad dash for her car.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Clark froze as he heard a crumpling sound under his feet as he slid into the car. He carefully glanced down and rooted about.

He blindly felt around -- oh, and how oddly awesome was that, that in Lex's body he could feel things, pick things up without breaking them without having to _see_ what he was doing? -- and retrieved the piece of paper.

He frowned down at it as he smoothed it out and brushed it off.

Then his jaw clenched as he read what was written on it.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Tess hadn't been able to follow his car, having lost it when it ramped up to speed, and she spent no little time panicking about what might happen to Lex if he didn't go where Lex had thought -- if she lost him -- but she caught up with Lex at the mansion again. The car was in the garage. Lex himself was lying on a couch in the library, supine, unconscious.

"Sir?" she asked quietly, kneeling down next to him and touching a shoulder.

Lex groaned and slowly came to. "What--?" he croaked, then winced as he tried to sit up. Tess helped him upright.

"Did it work?"

"Sir, he -- he doesn't even _move_ like you do."

"I'll take that as a 'yes' for observation, then." Lex grimaced. Then he stared down curiously at the paper laying on top of his chest.

He picked it up slowly and turned it over. Then he got a sour look.

"Sir?"

"Not exactly the answer I was hoping for," Lex said, holding out the paper to her.

Tess took it from him and read through it.

Printed in the middle of the page in a rather large font were the words, "Who are you?"

Written just underneath that in a half-legible scrawl in pen was the reply, "Stop running into trees. Haven't you ever heard of whiplash?"

"He repaired the car," Tess added, handing the piece of paper back.

"What?" Lex said, looking up startled, as he was carefully rubbing the back of his neck.

"Him, it, whoever or whatever it was..." Tess started.

"Let's say 'him', for now," Lex said grimly.

Tess nodded. "He repaired your car. He managed to push it back from the tree and did something to the engine, I think. He didn't even seem to consider calling for a tow truck or outside assistance."

"I don't know how to repair a car," Lex said slowly. Tess looked back at him, equally grim. After reviewing his bloodwork, neither of them had truly thought it likely that his highly-functional actions during his blackouts could have been the result of some alternate personality of his, only coming to the surface in times of stress, but...

"Did you call for a mechanic?" Lex asked as he forced himself upright, wobbling. Tess took his arm to support him.

"No sir, I--"

"Good," he interrupted. "Show me."

"Sir?"

"Show me the car. I want to see what he did."

~*~*~*~*~*~

They found the car in the garage, right exactly in the parking space where it belonged, which would have had the hairs standing up on the back of Lex's neck if he had had any.

Neither of them were able to tell one way or the other whether what had been done to get it working again had been odd, and the mechanic, when Lex finally let Tess call one and he showed up, wasn't much more informative.

"It'll cost you for the replacements and all the body work. The fix for the radiator and the timing belt was a quick one, but there wasn't anything really odd about it."

"Nothing at all?"

The man looked at Tess oddly. "Lady, you don't do forensics on a repair job for a car. I don't know whoever this anonymous guy is who repaired it for you. Most guys don't have a 'style' at how they repair shit. We just make it work the way it's supposed to. Though..." he paused, considering, "I guess I've seen this too often to call it an odd quirk, but nobody ever did this back west," he mused, pointing to the timing belt. "This kind of thing you only see around here, in farming country. It's not really uncommon, though. Everybody and their brother usually cuts their teeth on farm equipment before getting into cars in these parts. --But that's just a regional thing," he added. "You'd have better luck just walking into town and going door-to-door tracking down your good samaritan than trying to figure out differences between one guy or another doing this type of fix." He shrugged.

Lex paid him for his time and thanked him. As the butler escorted him out, Tess looked at her employer carefully.

"You aren't going to have him tow it away for repairs?"

"I don't see any reason to demolish another car," Lex said steadily, glancing back at her.

"Sir!" she protested.

"I'll be more careful next time," Lex promised, turning and barely keeping a straight line as he walked back to the door to the main house. "We know this works, so we'll stick with it for now. I'll just run into something a little softer next time," he ended.

Tess didn't like the sound of this one bit.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex sighed as he looked at the array of notes he'd assembled from the aftermath of the various shocks to his system, and tried to ignore the aches and pains he'd given himself over the last two weeks. Spurred by Tess' almost outright begging, he'd acquiesced and tried pharmaceutical help at one point, but as they discovered, taking sleep medication or any sort of drug to induce unconsciousness did not seem to allow the proper state to force his silent passenger to the surface in the way that a physical shock seemed to provide. He had, at least, acquiesced to not doing anything possibly damaging to induce the state more than twice a day in the evenings, after he'd completed the majority of his LuthorCorp work.

"Sir, I really don't think that you should be doing this!" Tess protested.

Lex usually enjoyed his half-sister's concern, but he was barely tolerating it now. Question after question, and the entity residing inside him had never answered directly. He looked down at the last note and had to force himself to stay calm, to not tear the paper to shreds.

"Please! The being seems to want to leave you to your own devices. We should focus on suppression, not--"

"I will not be a host to some unknown Kryptonian _thing_ ," Lex ground out. "We don't know its true motives." Lex didn't want to think of what it might mean if it was some remnant of Zod. "We've barely been able to get a response from it." His lips curled up in a snarl. "And I will not be dictated to or threatened," he ended, setting down the paper, the scrawl on which read, "Stop doing this, or I will make you stop."

Up until this latest message, he'd had hopes that it might be benign. But now it seemed more likely that perhaps it was only lying in wait for some signal, and only serving its own purposes by keeping him alive until then.

Lex sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers. "In a way," he mused, "we are making progress. We know it thinks it can be more active, and that it displays a rather astounding level of arrogance."

"But if we suppress it until we can remove it--"

"No. I need information. I need to be able to communicate with it. The last one of these things we saw was incapable of intelligible speech when not possessing a human body, and could not survive long outside of one. I don't want to risk a loss of a direct information source like this. We need to provoke it to action, to make it show its true intentions." Lex stood, pushed himself upright.

"Sir, please. If you would just let me approach it, I could..."

"No!" Lex said, whirling back around and grabbing Tess by the arms. "I will not risk exposing anyone else to this thing. We don't know whether it is capable of the baseline Kryptonian abilities we've seen in other cases."

"It's never demonstrated--"

" _We. Don't. Know._ " Lex repeated. "It could kill you. Or worse." He dropped his hands, letting go of her. "I've already put your safety at risk far more than I should have, telling you about the Kryptonans and having you follow me to observe."

"Sir-- Lex-- please. I want to do this. You shouldn't have to risk everything yourself! We need you, too! The company, the projects, your employees, the entire human race needs you. You have done things no-one else could."

"No -- I have _failed_ , time and time again. I need answers. I need the knowledge this thing must have."

"Clark Kent--"

"He is a liar and a wretch and I cannot trust anything he has to say!" Lex yelled at her. He took a shuddering breath and composed himself, still shaking in rage. "I don't know who or what he is and I will not depend upon him for anything. He had made it clear that he does not have anyone's best interests at heart, other than his own."

"Sir--"

"I _will_ be going through with the next phase tomorrow night at seven." Lex stated with finality, turning and walking towards the double doors of the library. He opened one of them, then paused. "If you wish to be on hand afterwards and try to speak with the thing, I cannot stop you," he said with a heavy air of resignment, then walked out.

The door swung shut behind him silently.

Tess breathed a small sigh of relief.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Tess cursed as she stared at the white chess piece in her hand. _Not now! Any other night, any other **time** but now!_ she screamed silently at it.

But of course, she could not ignore the summons. Not so brazenly and without consequences. Dire consequences.

She weighed the risk of Lex, alone tonight without her, and her being there with him and ignoring the summons from Checkmate. If she stayed with Lex tonight, she would be killed and soon -- traitors and nonrespondents were, no-one ever 'retired' from Checkmate alive -- but if she didn't stay with him, if she left him to do her mission, just this once, she would be there for all the future times to come. For whatever other moves she was given, assuming that Checkmate did not call her away at another highly inopportune time.

Was this one night important enough that it was worth throwing away all future chances of helping him?

Would he forgive her for not being there for him, this one time, and forever without an explanation?

She clenched her fist around the white knight piece and tried not to scream in frustration.

Then she slowly, resolutely unclenched her fist and carefully set the chess piece down on the table in front of her.

Tess looked at her watch. It was five o'clock. Maybe, just maybe, if she left immediately, if she was fast enough...

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex breathed out a sigh, though of relief or of shame for having wished for Tess' presence but gotten her absence, he wasn't sure which.

It was seven-thirty-two and Tess wasn't here yet. If she had arrived, she would have announced herself, and she was never late -- always early.

 _She must have received a summons from Checkmate,_ Lex realized dourly. He was suddenly glad that he'd given her that jamming necklace earlier that day, instead of putting it off. Frankly, he was lucky that they hadn't detected the transmission from her eye-cams before; if they had, she'd be dead, and would never have even known the reason why. It was a surprise to find out about the group, reviewing her footage, but now that Lex knew about them he could keep a look out for their agents and plan accordingly.

He couldn't really blame her; she'd joined them before she'd begun work at LuthorCorp, and only been reactivated once there. Conflicting loyalties aside, he knew how far he could trust her, and it was a great deal farther than most.

He resolved to schedule a surgery for her to remove the surveillance chips from her eyes, soon. Even if their signal couldn't be picked up through the jamming signal, the jamming signal itself could be, and what would happen if she was on a mission in the future and the necklace was removed? Or if someone thought to run a full bodyscan on her at some point? ...No, learning more about Checkmate by continuing to spy on Tess was not worth the risk of losing his little half-sis. Neither was exposing her to the entity while it was in control of him. He'd just have to keep a closer eye on her the old-fashioned way, lock down the chemical labs and medicinal greenhouses with even more security, and hope that her days of cooking up lethal substances to surreptitiously poison people really were well and truly over -- because she was more than intelligent enough than to let a little thing like those 'inconveniences' stop her, rather than just find a way to work around them and get done what she wanted done. But it was a little hard to mix poisons without looking at what you were doing, and she'd always been very self-sufficient and a hands-on gal. Maybe if Lex just had all the workstations surreptitiously well-surveilled instead...?

Lex glanced at his watch again. Seven-thirty-seven. He was itching at this point. He couldn't wait any longer. If he was going to do this... no, no, he would do it now, or he never would.

He took a deep breath, in and out. He touched a trembling finger to the rig, then steeled his will, put it on and braced himself.

He felt his breathing become erratic. He had to stay still. He had to do this. It would all be over soon, he just had to--

He couldn't do this.

His hands flew up to tear the rig off of his head when it hit. He kicked out, spasming uncontrollably. Everything whited out to gray and black and he slumped.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Clark slowly sat up, groaning. He shuddered and wiped a bit of spittle from the corner of his mouth.

"Th- h-ll?" he mumbled out. Something was really wrong.

He felt something heavy on his head and wrestled with straps, half-blind by starbursts of light across his vision. Grumbling, feeling fumble-fingered and all-the-wrong-size for his body like he hadn't in ages -- had he ever _really_ felt that way before while stuck in Lex? -- he was finally able to pull it off.

Christ. It looked like some medieval torture device, all metal bands and straps and wires...

...Wires?

Clark followed the line with Lex's eyes once his vision cleared. Yes, wires. The damn thing was plugged into a wall socket--

Then his eyes widened and he stared down at what he was holding in his hands.

First, he felt horror.

Then, he felt rage.

He stood up, grasping the electroshock helmet in both hands, raised it over his head, and threw it at the floor as hard as he could. The thing crumpled, and crumpled further as Clark stomped the damnable thing into the hardwood floor, smashing it to pieces. He didn't stop until he was sure the thing could never be put back together again.

"Stupid-- stupid--!" Clark yelled at no-one as he paced the length of the entertainment room between the couch and the overturned wooden coffee table. His legs ached, and he had no doubt that Lex had kicked out hard enough to send it across the room where it lay when he spasmed. From the electrical shock. From the _self-induced_ electrical shock.

" _What the fuck is wrong with you!_ " he yelled again, knowing no one would hear him, not even Lex, and that almost made it that much worse.

 _How the hell could he have done this to himself? After Belle Reeve?_ Clark couldn't comprehend it. He must have been well and truly _out of his mind_ to--

And then Clark remembered what he'd written in his last note to Lex. When he'd been so angry he wasn't thinking straight, because Lex had nearly drowned himself that time, and that had brought back the bridge...

And he only realized now how Lex would have reacted to what he'd written, how he knew better than to give Lex ultimatums--

Except Clark was dead now, and Lex _still_ couldn't just _leave him alone_ , and Lex was being an _idiot_ , and... and Clark suddenly knew what he'd have to do to get through to him. The idea slotted into place like a puzzle piece. It just fit. And was fitting, given the circumstances. ...And was entirely horrific, but Clark wasn't about to let that stop him, because sometimes even ghosts got angry enough to make the walls bleed red once in awhile.

Clark stomped out of the TV room, down the hallway, snagged Lex's coat and keys on the way to the garage, strode out and down to one of the unwrecked cars, turned the key in the ignition switch, and drove off like a bat out of hell.

Yes, Clark knew exactly what do to, and exactly where he was going. He didn't need a note for this. In this case, a note would, in fact, be counterproductive. Lex needed to know how serious he was about this.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Tess arrived at the mansion at 11pm.

When she made it to the entertainment room and saw the destruction, her hand stilled on the doorknob.

She slowly walked in, looking about. No Lex. No entity-in-Lex.

She let out a breath of... not relief, exactly, but...

She started to straighten up the room, turning the coffee table upright and lifting it back into place.

Then she frowned as she caught sight of the remote.

She bent down and picked it up carefully, and realized that the note taped on top of the control pad had never been removed, never been touched -- it was straight and unwrinkled.

"Watch this, please," it had written across it. Tess' mouth thinned as she remembered how they'd debated quite a bit about the inclusion of the 'please'. But, given the placement of the coffee table and where the remote had landed, as well as the lack of mess on the opposite side of the table, Tess suddenly realized that the table must have been overturned _before_ the swath of destruction had taken place. Which meant that the entity hadn't seen the note. Which meant that it hadn't watched the tape of Lex talking to it, explaining, asking yet again for more information in return.

So if the tape and this next, newest attempt at communication hadn't set it off, what had?

Surveying the room more carefully, Tess realized that all the damage and kicked-aside and overturned furniture centered around the crushed components of the electroshock device. ...At least, that was what Tess assumed it was, given its absence in the room, because whatever it was had been smashed and shattered beyond recognition.

Tess wondered whether it had been the change from physical to electrical shock that had caused the outburst of rage, or whether it had been something else. It had been the first time they'd tried it -- they couldn't have set things up indoors in such a way as to assure the entity would wake up in an otherwise soothing environment if it had been a physically violent shock -- and maybe the electricity had had a different effect on it.

But Tess realized she might be assuming too much. She'd heard whispers from his other staff that Lex was sometimes prone to fits of rage on occasion. Maybe the helmet hadn't worked and Lex had woken up upset. He hadn't seemed very open to the idea when she'd first brought it up, so much so that she'd never suggested it again. She'd been surprised when he'd brought it up again for this purpose.

Either way, he ought to be in bed. The entity defaulted to bringing him to Lex's rooms -- or to the couch in the library, but he hadn't been in the latter area when Tess had arrived. Lex himself would have retired to his rooms, this late and after such a failure.

But when Tess knocked on Lex's bedroom door, and then quietly let herself in, she was unprepared for the third possibility -- that Lex wasn't there at all.

That exact moment was when Tess started to panic.

She immediately rushed to the library and called up the mansion's surveillance footage, to see what it showed. She learned that, yes, the entity hadn't watched the tape; yes, the device had set it off in a rage somehow; and she traced down its movements through the house. She cursed when she saw that it had taken an undamaged car, and quickly dialed the security company for the _car_ to call up a GPS trace on its coordinates.

She had a very sickening feeling when the last known position of the car turned out to be the parking lot at Belle Reeve Mental Hospital outside of Metropolis. The entity had never gone _towards_ people before, and if it had 'swapped' out Lex's body for some crazy meteor-mutant inmate, or worse...

She called in the helicopter and got herself to Belle Reeve as fast as she could.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex woke in a pain-filled daze.

 _Never... doing that... again..._ he thought, groaning. He tried to sit up, felt his shoulders wrench, and smacked face first into something soft.

 _Th' hell?_ Lex thought dazedly. Why weren't his arms moving? ...Stuck behind his back?

He twisted to look back and realized he was handcuffed. He shifted and then realized he wasn't in bed.

A soft floor?

White walls.

_Oh god. Oh god no. Nonono._

He slithered backwards and his back his the wall. He kicked himself upright and looked around in shock.

_No - no - no!_

He was in a padded cell.

Restrained in a low-lit, padded cell.

_Oh god, what happened? What did I do?_

Lex started to shake, and very nearly started to cry. _I didn't hurt anyone, I couldn't have hurt anyone -- not again! No!!!_

Lex started to scream and thrash uncontrollably.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex hated this thing.

Lex hated this thing like he had never hated anything or anyone else in his life before now.

Until this moment, he hadn't _truly_ known what hate was, and that should have scared him a little, but the rage in him now felt too large for his skin to contain.

Lex hated with a hot rage that turned cold, so cold he was set shivering, and it took _three fucking hours_ for Tess to get him out of there.

It had only been by luck that an enterprising young janitor had taken a shortcut through the section where he was being held that night, and wound up cleaning the floors and changing a few lightbulbs. Apparently that wing was currently in disuse and was usually only checked once a week.

It could have been three days before anyone had found him.

This knowledge felt like a block of lead in his gut and only made it all that much worse.

It had been a little after seven-thirty when Lex had shocked himself under. He heard later from Tess that it had been around eight when the entity had finally woken up, far longer than the usual time delay between shock-and-surfacing. The entity had gone berserk, hadn't even looked for a method of commincation -- _physically violent and no curiosity when enraged,_ Lex mentally added to his list of the Kryptonian's personality traits, _oh no, no pattern there,_ he thought sarcastically, _**that's** not common to all the other Kryptonians we've had to deal with at **all**_ \-- and had taken him, abducted him and his body away to Belle Reeve.

The entity had taken him into a building full of people... and then taken a tour of the facility.

It had acted like him. _Just_ like him. It had fooled everyone.

Tess had finally managed to get Lex out by saying that what he'd done -- slipping away, locking himself away in a room in an unused wing, and yellng to see how long it took someone to notice something was wrong -- had been a sort of security check. She'd made out that the security monitors needed to pay attention to whether, when someone looked like they were exiting the facility, they'd _actually exited the facility_ , and that the entire system was horrifically lax, if someone could get into the holding cell area after hours without anyone noticing. That someone doing what Lex had done could have just as easily been letting people out instead of locking themselves -- or someone _else_ \-- in.

The entity-in-Lex had arrived at the facility at eight-fifteen -- clearly not following the speed limit laws for the highway -- toured it for thirty-two minutes, talked with doctor after administrator after high-ranking security personnel coordinator, and then made to leave. And then not actually left. He'd looked up at one of the cameras and smiled thinly. Then he'd easily -- far, far too easily -- disappeared off the security grid. He and Tess still weren't sure exactly sure which hallways, service corridors, and stairwells he'd taken, but Lex was damned if he wasn't going to have every _inch_ of the place properly covered from there on in. He'd gotten a pair of handcuffs from god-knows-where -- apparently a supply closet, he'd found out later after looking through inventory lists, and realizing what else they tended to stock with the straightjackets -- walked Lex's body into a vacant room, closed the door behind him, sat down, handcuffed himself, then had laid down and fallen asleep at eight-fifty-eight-pm, from the timestamp on the cell's security footage... cell footage that apparently wasn't ever looked at unless someone was listed as occupying the cell -- another oversight that Lex was going to see corrected.

Lex had regained consciousness at eight-fifty-nine pm, and promptly began to panic.

Lex tried to tell himself that it had been a perfectly reasonable response, given his previous experience at Belle Reeve, most of which he didn't really remember due to the electroshock treatment he'd received there...

And that thought had him suppressing shudders for _hours_ , when he'd made _that_ connection. Because those records had been scrubbed. No-one should have known about that, except those few people intimately involved in the matter, the majority of which were dead, the few remaining characterized by a strong refusal to talk.

Most of Smallville had circulated rumors about where he'd been that month, but even in those who had been somehow clued in in whispers to Belle Reeve had _never_ known about the shock treatment.

No-one should have known.

This thing didn't just know him, it _knew_ him. Intimately. Either it had full access to his memories, or...

Lex took a deep shuddering breath and leaned back in his office chair as far as he could go. Tess was at his right hand, they were safely esconced back in the library at the mansion again, and they were still reviewing the security footage she'd all but stolen at gunpoint from Belle Reeve for him.

And Lex found himself having to keep reminding himself of that every few minutes as he watched the entity play-act him on the screens.

Because the damn thing did it, and did it well.

Except when it didn't. On purpose. And then looked straight at the closest camera dead-on.

Tess had told him that the entity didn't even move like him. And it certainly hadn't.

When he had been walking Lex into the trap.

The entity had acted just as it usually did, avoiding people and moving the way it usually moved -- Tess confirmed -- from the exact moment at which Lex had been thought to have left the facility onwards.

But before that...

Before that, it had moved, acted, and apparently had _sounded_ like Lex the entire time it had been interacting with the staff. It had talked like him. Exactly like him. It was exactly like him.

...Except for those short moments where it did something painfully obviously not-Lex-like -- lightly scuffing a shoe against the floor, or riffling its fingers behind its back, or a dozen other little, small things, over time -- and then immediately after doing so, casually glanced at the cameras as if to say, _No, I'm really not you, just in case you were wondering and couldn't tell. Because no-one else can, you know. Not unless I want them to._

Lex had regained consciousness at eight-fifty-nine pm, and the janitor had found him at nine-twenty. Lex had spent the next ten minutes trying to explain to the hastily-called doctors what had happened -- except he couldn't without sounding crazy to anyone who didn't know about the Kryptonian menace, so it had mostly involved demanding for Tess to be called in and explain and strongly implying that she would have evidence that wouldn't be just one person's word against another's -- because he hadn't been in good straits when the janitor had come across him crying and begging like that to nothing but the four walls, nearly incoherent in panic.

Tess had arrived at eleven-thirty, frantic, and had been ushered in to see Lex in the interrogation room where he was still being held, despite his having been able to answer all of the security protocols correctly. It hurt that he hadn't been able to extricate himself from the situation on his own, especially since he'd put those protocols in place for that explicit purpose -- so that he'd never be held against his will in Belle Reeve ever again. He refused to acknowledge how scared he'd been.

Only after Tess had arrived had it become clear how goddamn insidious the entity had been. The reason why they hadn't let him leave the facility.

They'd thought Lex was insane, and that he'd been unofficially checking himself in.

The entity had made mention of having trouble falling asleep sometimes, casually mentioned nightmares. Worried -- about a friend, mind you -- how one could handle someone who might become violent at night when not quite awake enough to realize what they were doing. Wondered about some of the patients who had schitzophrenia, and what it was like to not feel entirely yourself sometimes. Slowly painted a picture across multiple conversations with different people of a very highly-stressed businessman who might, it just so happened, feel like spending a night or two in a safe, comfortable room at times, in a facility he owned and operated, where he could spend the night alone and without being bothered by, or bothering anyone else. ...Just in case he had screaming nightmares and a full-on psychotic break, to avoid hurting himself or others if not thoroughly restrained.

When Lex had been pulled from that room, the facility staff had realized something was wrong and compared notes. Apparently they weren't completely stupid. And when they'd pieced together the picture that the entity had spun out for them in all those not-so-random bits of odd comments and strange interests, they'd gotten worried -- and rightfully so... if it hadn't all been a complete and utter stinking, malintentioned fucking _lie_.

Tess hadn't been able to get him out of there until two-thirty the next morning, and he had no doubt that she was going to try and shield him at least a little from the bribes, threats, and other measures she had surely had to take to do so. She'd probably done everything short of calling in his 'special' security staff and storming the place with his own personal bodyguard of troops to extract him in a military strikeforce-like fashion, and Lex didn't doubt that it had been a near fucking thing that she hadn't had to make that call.

Fucking, goddamn alien. It had followed through with its warning... with another warning.

_"You want to act suicidal? Maybe I'll take over and help... or maybe I'll help you along."_

Because it was only by providence that that janitor had come by. It could have been three days before anyone had found him. Three days was a long time without food or water.

And the thing could've just as easily driven him off a cliff.

...And then proceeded to fly off and simply inhabit some other, less annoying, ignorant human being, if the behavior of the other entity had been any indication.

Lex got the message loud and clear.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Tess finished her long shower and dried off. She dressed in a nightgown and bathrobe, pushed her hair back behind an ear, and glanced at the clock -- three-thirty in the morning.

God, she was tired.

She couldn't imagine how Lex felt just then.

...It wouldn't hurt to check in on him in bed, right? Just this once?

It wouldn't _really_ be taking liberties with him; Lex had told her that he wanted her living with him to help keep an eye out on any odd behavior on his part, as well as to have his main executive assistant close by. Even before he'd told her about the Kryptonian entity; possibly even before he'd known about it himself.

She'd sleep so much better knowing that he was where she thought he was. Where he should be.

She padded down the hallway to his room, silently opened the door a crack and waited for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. Then she swung open the door and stared at the vacant bed.

_Oh god._

She checked the bathroom, then made for the library. He wasn't in there either. She half-ran down the corridor towards the garage--

And then she slowed as she saw light coming from under the door to the kitchen.

She breathed a sigh of relief and slowly walked to the door. She knocked and entered, pulling her bathrobe about her a little tighter with one hand and feeling slightly embarassed at her state of disshevelment in front of her employer.

Lex blinked up at her from a glass of milk and a stack of chocolate chip cookies, halfway through eating a bite. He stopped mid-chew.

Tess smiled slightly at his look, like he'd been caught in the act. She'd never seen him eating cookies before. It seemed so... normal.

"Sorry, I--" Tess took another deep breath. Lex had assured her that she had every right to be here; that the mansion was her home now, too. "I was just wondering where you were. After everything tonight, I..." she trailed off feeling like a fool.

Lex seemed to unpause and finish his mouthful of cookie. He washed it down with some milk, then set the glass down and smiled back.

"I just..." she said softly.

Lex sighed and gestured at a stool. Tess sat down gratefully.

And then she smiled as he pushed the cookie plate towards her.

She took a cookie, and watched him stand and get a second glass, pour her her own milk, and pass that over as well.

Their fingers barely touched, warm flesh contrasting against the cool glass.

He sat back down and finished his cookie.

Tess played with her necklace a bit.

"You're not Lex, are you?" Tess asked.

The entity looked up at her with a very Lex-like considering gaze. "What makes you say that, Miss Mercer?" it asked.

"Lex usually hunches over his food quite a bit more than that."

"No, he doesn't. He never--" A pause. "Damnit."

Tess grinned, then smoothed the expression away quickly.

The entity sighed gustily and gave up the pretense, slouching over entirely and holding its head up with an elbow on the table. It glared at her. "You learned that from Lex," it accused.

"I did not!" Tess responded, affronted. She'd learned that trick herself, long ago, thank you.

It rolled Lex's eyes, and it should have looked stranger, seeing it use Lex like that, seeing those expressions using Lex's face. "Whatever. Wasn't very nice."

Tess' eyes narrowed. "No, locking Lex in a cell in Belle Reeve 'wasn't very nice'," she snarled back.

"I warned him," it replied angrily. As though that covered everything. But then it continued. "And electroshock? What the hell was Lex _on_ when he thought that was a good idea?" it shot back. "He goes from halfway bashing his brains in every night -- like that many head injuries is good for anyone -- and then nearly drowning himself -- like _that's_ any better -- to _that?_ " It hunched Lex's shoulders and looked irate. "I can't believe he did that to himself. It's bad enough that he isn't taking care of himself properly, but..." The entity cut himself off from whatever else it wanted to say, then bit into another cookie. It ate in silence, but Tess could almost see the cursing going on behind its eyes. Lex's eyes. What used to be Lex's eyes.

"You're angry with him," Tess said slowly.

"Of course I'm angry with him; he's being an idiot and hurting himself!" it yelled at her. "At this rate, I might as well drive him off a cliff and save him the trouble," it grumbled.

"You _have_ been spying on him!"

"I-- what?" It looked at her in confusion, then rubbed Lex's face with his hands. "Oh, for god's sake--"

"How else would you know what he said?" Tess insisted.

"Lex said--?" The entity shook its head. "No, look -- I don't know what he's doing when I'm not... well..." It shook its head again. "Look, that's not important. I didn't know what Lex said; he probably said that because he was thinking of crashing off the bridge and his mind just goes there, ok?"

"What bridge?"

The entity stared at her. Then it closed its eyes and seemed to do a mental facepalm. It took a few deep breaths, that seemed to hitch at the end for some reason, then said slowly, "I am not spying on Lex, ok? He doesn't need to worry about me overhearing something and.. and... taking over when he's asleep and telling company secrets to other people over the phone, or something. Can you just tell him that so he'll stop? Please?"

Somehow, Tess felt that telling the entity Lex's real reasons for doing what he was doing would not help Lex at all. So instead, she said, "Really? So you don't usually wake up in the middle of the night and run Lex's body around doing who-knows-what?"

Its jaw clenched and he stood up abruptly, towering over Tess. "That's never happened before tonight. Whatever he's doing, either he's hurt himself badly enough that I'm coming up spontaneously, or the electricity did something different. He's never done that before." Then he paused and _looked_ at her, mostly a question, and definitely a threat.

Tess gulped. "No, you're right -- he's never done that before. With electricity. Tonight was the first -- and only -- time," she assured it.

It stared at her for a moment before apparently deciding she wasn't lying, then sat back down on its own stool. "He needs to stop before it gets to be something he can't recover from. I shouldn't be coming up like this." It paused, then added, "It's not like you have to trust me," as it stared down into its milk glass. "I know Lex must have the whole place bugged and filmed by now. You can check." Then it suddenly looked tired beyond belief. "I wouldn't have gotten up, but... I just... I couldn't get back to sleep. Get _him_ back to sleep." He gestured down at Lex's body. "I just wanted to get something to eat, and some warm milk, before lying down and trying again." Its lips thinned. "Lex hasn't exactly been eating properly; I didn't think a little extra food would hurt."

"Lex is fine," Tess protested.

"Lex is a fucking skeleton," it shot back, glaring at her again. Then it got a good look at her disbelieving expression and, with a terse, "Fine," started stripping off Lex's nightshirt.

Tess' eyes widened. She shouldn't be seeing--

"No, look. This-- this is your job, too, isn't it? To look after him? Look," it said, standing and grabbing her arm by the wrist. It wrapped her fingers around Lex wrist. "Just look!"

Tess blinked. Her fingers wrapped around Lex's wrist with space to spare.

"He's skeletal. I don't know what he's been doing, or not doing, but... he didn't used to be like this. He's skin and bones now." It pulled away and gestured at Lex's arms. "No muscle, almost. This isn't normal," it continued. "You should be able to look at pictures of him..." then it stopped and frowned. "No, wait, that might not..." it muttered, thinking. Then it brightened. "Ask his tailors," it said. "He might be able to hide it with his clothes, but his tailors would know. They have to know his sizes, and they'd keep records of any changes."

"How..." Tess asked, touching Lex's arm lightly. How had she not seen this?

"I'm only in and out intermittently," it said, patting her hand lightly. "I bet it was gradual, so it's not like you would have really noticed while it was happening unless there was something drastic, probably. But I just saw the difference all at once, so..." It trailed off and shrugged, pulling away from her and putting Lex's shirt back on him.

"How long have you been around?" Tess asked, looking up at it.

Its hands stilled at buttonning a button, then it smiled an empty smile at her and continued what it was doing. "I don't know what you mean," it lied.

"Yes, you do," Tess pressed. "Either you're lying about listening in on him, or you're lying about having been around him longer than we thought. You couldn't know him some other way. There are too many things, personal things, that Lex--" she swallowed. "You should watch the tape," she said decisively, changing topics.

It frowned at her. "What tape?"

"The tape you were supposed to watch tonight." It frowned at her. "You don't think Lex shocked himself indoors for fun, did you?"

It gave her a very dark look that nearly gave her pause. "Lex wanted me to watch some tape?" Tess nodded. "Do you know what's on it?"

"No, not exactly," Tess had to admit.

The entity sighed shortly, looked away, and said, "If I watch this tape, I'll be doing what Lex wants. He'll think that if he continues to do things like this to himself, that he'll get what he wants. He'll keep hurting himself."

And Tess suddenly realized that the entity hadn't really wanted to do to Lex what it had done, at all. Somehow, Lex had driven it into a corner.

Which meant they had to press the advantage, right now.

"I won't tell," Tess said, as earnestly as she could.

"Yes, you will," it said simply, not even bothering to look at her as it cleaned up the dishes.

"I can put the mansion's security tapes on a loop; he'll never know," Tess continued.

It laughed at her bleakly. "Of course he'll know. He'll take one look at you, ask, and know."

"I won't tell," Tess repeated, lying for all she was worth.

But it shook its head. "He'll know you're lying. He's good at knowing when people do that. Especially when you won't be wanting to lie to him."

And that... sounded really odd. But it also sounded like it might believe her, so--

"Please," Tess asked. "Just watch the tape. Lex wouldn't have done something so--" she thought quickly, "--so very desperate if it wasn't important."

Christ, the thing actually paused and looked at her. It was considering it. Either it was really bound up in keeping up this front of its... or it actually somehow cared about Lex's well-being for whatever reason.

"He does listen to me. Sometimes. I can convince him to stop hurting himself like this, trying to contact you. This was going to be his last attempt," Tess lied at the last. Mixing the drop of a lie with the truth. Because of course this wasn't going to be Lex's last attempt... or it wouldn't have been, until this thing had dropped Lex into the bowels of Belle Reeve. Tess suddenly started to rethink what she was doing...

"I-- ...Just. Just this once," it said, haltingly.

...just a little too late.

Tess took a deep breath, then outwardly smiled and nodded. What was done was done.

And Lex had worried that she couldn't handle it. She smiled inwardly, but this smile was a lot more sharp.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Tess had managed to convince it to let her watch with it, partly due to the fact that she would've seen it, or at least been briefed on its contents, if she'd been able to come that night. It had frowned and asked her point-blank why she _hadn't_ been there, and she'd lied about car trouble. For some reason, it seemed to be taking everything she said at face value.

It settled into a corner of the couch, as Tess cued up the entertainment center. She started the video, and sat down next to it. Then she watched its eyes slowly close and its breathing even out, watched the tension slowly unwind out of Lex's body as the creature relaxed its hold.

Shit. If it fell asleep now...

She slid over, leaned close, and touched a hand to its shoulder.

It made a sleepy noise and curled an arm around her waist, pulling her in, mumbling something.

She stiffened, and that seemed to wake the alien up a little. It slowly blinked and tilted its head around, stared down at her, then it blinked again and its eyes seemed to refocus.

It... blushed. And started to pull away.

Tess relaxed and snuggled into it, slightly.

It... did that odd thing where it seemed to... pause, not quite stilling its motion, not quite freezing in place. It stiffened just slightly, staring down at her, then shifted into a more comfortable posture. For her.

She forced herself to look at the screen and relaxed herself further, pretending not to pay it any real attention at all. She felt it begin to relax as well, and it almost tentatively shifted its hold to something more... acceptable. Less familiar. Not sexual, and not taking liberties.

So, clearly alien, then.

But while it did not seem to scream "machoistic!" or gives off waves of pure masculinity, Lex had been correct in his initial blind assessment -- 'it' was most certainly 'he', and 'he' was most definitely male.

A somewhat uncomfortable, worried-at-such-close-proximity to a stunning female such as herself, male.

 _Geek,_ she thought unsympathetically, then wondered why exactly she was starting to think of it as having human qualities, again. She'd been very careful in the kitchen.

Too careful. She'd had to actively try and remind herself every time she had needed a pronoun.

Damn, but this thing was insidious.

And it seemed to be drifting off to sleep again.

 _What the hell do I have to do to..._ she thought in exasperation. Mentally hating this stupid man for making her do this, she reached up a hand to its chin, felt it half-startle, then pushed herself up and kissed it. Him.

He... didn't really react much. Its eyes fluttered shut, and its hands fell back to her waist again, loosely, and it relaxed all over, but...

God, this thing obviously was not Lex. It was completely willing to give her full control of the situation.

She slowly deepened the kiss, and felt it shiver under her, felt its jaw relax a little. She slipped her tongue in and it nearly collapsed back into the crook of the sofa completely. It _finally_ started to respond, and then...

Eyes opened wide and she was being held out at arms length.

"You... shouldn't... do that..." it breathed raspily. Tess could feel the shivers running down its arms.

"Why not?"

It stared at her. "I'm not Lex." As if she needed reminding. "I... I didn't fall asleep completely. He's not back yet."

 _Oh._ Tess smiled up at him, winding her hands around his borrowed wrists. "Lex doesn't let me kiss him like that."

"...That's supposed to be a reason? To let you kiss... his body? When he's... not around?"

Tess blinked at him, then reviewed her words. _Oh, shit._ "That's not what I--" she started.

He let go of her and dropped his hands. Turned away, looking miserable. "Just. Don't."

Tess inched closer, sitting up against his side. He curled his arms around himself and pushed Lex's body further into the side of the couch, wincing away, saying, "Stop."

"Don't you want to know why?" she asked, remembering what Lex had said about him not being curious.

"This is wrong," he replied, glancing up at the TV where Lex was still talking lowly, then glancing away.

Tess turned the TV off and tossed the remote onto the coffee table.

"We're supposed to be watching that," it said quietly, not looking at her.

"You were falling asleep; I'll have to rewind it anyway."

"I _should_ be asleep," it said. "It's ten-past-four in the morning," it added, closing its eyes.

"How do you know what time it is?" Tess asked, watching it carefully. There weren't any clocks in view.

"Because it was three-twenty when..." it trailed off, then looked confused for a moment. "It... just is," it ended. "Lex is gonna be falling asleep at work tomorrow as it is and--"

"It's Saturday," Tess cut in.

"Huh?" it said, turning to look at her.

"It was Friday night when Lex shocked himself. It's Saturday now. He can sleep in."

It frowned at her, but the fatigue was obviously making it difficult for him to concentrate properly. "Didn't know what day it was," he muttered, turning away and settling into the side of the couch again.

"Do you know what the date is?" she asked.

"Don't care. Doesn't matter," it mumbled back.

"What do you care about?"

"Nothing," it said nearly inaudibly.

"Really? Not even about Lex?"

"No."

"You're lying."

"Am not."

"You are."

"Not."

"Yes, you are."

"Shut up," he growled, squeezing his eyes shut and shifting even farther away from her, withdrawing.

"You are lying."

"I'm not."

"You are. Admit it."

"Lex never did this," he mumbled, so quietly she almost didn't hear it.

"He never called you on it when you lied to him?" she asked lightly.

"N--" He stopped partway through the word, too late. He shifted about to face her, eyes wide.

"That woke you up, didn't it?" Tess said smugly. "You used to interact with Lex as someone else before you possessed him!" she crowed triumphantly. Then she wasn't feeling nearly so smug when she found herself sprawled backwards on the couch with a hand around her throat.

She tried to claw at him, but the next thing she realized, too late to react, he had her restrained -- both her hands caught in his free hand and held down above her head. He straddled her so she couldn't kick at him. She had no purchase.

So instead of fighting back like he'd expected, she relaxed. And then she realized that he wasn't actually trying to strangle the breath out of her. And then she smiled up at him.

"Was it something I said?" she asked sweetly, intentionally provoking him, then gasped as pure anger rippled across his face and the grip around her neck tightened.

"Right...handed...I...see..." she managed to get out, and his grip tightened further, but as spots filled her vision and unbidden tears leaked down the sides of her face, through it all she saw the fight between anger and something else in his face. And he seemed to gain control over himself... somehow... and slowly loosened his grip. It was a fight, though. He was breathing heavily by the time he was done, sweat standing out on Lex's forehead, and so was she.

She was probably going to have bruises from what he'd done later, but far more importantly... "You stopped," she whispered hoarsely. This was the first time anyone had seen any Kryptonian exhibit any sort of self-control.

"What?"

"You didn't kill me," she said, incredulously, like she could hardly believe it.

He reeled back like he'd been slapped, eyes wide. Horrified. He sat back, letting go over her completely.

"I--" he said, shakily.

She sat up slowly, smiling. She'd thought she'd gauged him correctly in this, but still, she could hardly believe it. She'd been right.

Dear god, but this meant that he really _wasn't_ the threat that Lex was afraid of. ...And really was the possible source of information Lex had, conversely, hoped for, as well.

She stared at him, and he looked about to bolt. She touched his arm gently, and he flinched. But she didn't pull away, and she didn't let him do so, either. She moved in on him, and he shrank back again.

She was practically in his lap, and his eyes were darting about, anywhere but at her, when she brought her other hand up to his chin and tilted his head up to meet her eyes.

"I'm not angry," Tess told him.

"I don't understand," he said miserably, and it was clear he really didn't.

"I provoked you on purpose," she explained as gently as she could. She would leave the rage at him daring to lay a hand on her for later. Lex wanted information; she would get Lex information.

He started, startled all over again. Got angry. Pushed it back under with... remorse? Then righteous fury. Then guilt. He fought with himself internally, incessantly. She watched the thing tie himself up in a tangled mess of mental knots right in front of her, and realized that this _wasn't_ an abnormal thing for it, the way its actions and thoughts seemed to be progressing. They almost made sense. A human sort of sense.

And if this thing had any sort of human-like reaction to guilt... Tess could use this.

"You shouldn't have done that," the alien said.

"I had to."

"No, you didn't!"

"I did."

"Why?" he asked, and Tess nearly sucked in a breath in surprise. It wasn't exactly curiousity, but... when had Kryptonians ever expressed even the most meager sort of interest in human affairs?

...Hell, for that matter, why did this Kryptonian care so much about Lex in the first place? These things could jump bodies like kangaroos on crack, couldn't they? It's not like the thing's health and well-being depended on and centered around Lex's own state of body and mind.

Just because this thing had known -- and self-admittedly lied to -- Lex previously didn't mean it had any reason to care about him then, either.

"Why?" she echoed back. He nodded tentatively. _Fucking hell._ "Because we need to know," she replied forcefully.

"Need to know what?" he asked, sounding aggrieved.

"About Kryptonians." _You._ "Everything."

"No, you don't," he said shakily.

"We do," she said firmly. "The war is coming--"

"What war?"

"...The war with the Kryptonians," Tess said.

He stared at her. Then laughed. Tess pushed down the rage hard, she couldn't let it surface, couldn't let this thing see how much she hated the idea that this _thing_ thought that it would be no contest, could be no contest, no hope for humanity--

"You-- you--" he caught his breath slowly, then something seemed to dawn on him. "You... you think...?" He stared at her. "Lex thinks...?" His eyes defocused, looking through her. "No, that's..." He drew away, disentangled himself from her and stood up. "That's not..." he shook his head. "There's no war," he said, looking down at her bleakly.

Tess turned and stood herself. "No. We know that's not true. --We need to know. What to expect. How to fight it. How many of you are going to--" _why is he shaking his head like that?_

"There's no war," he repeated. "There's no-- it's over."

"...It's over?" Tess repeated dumbly.

"Everything's--" he sighed. "Everything's done. There's nothing left."

"What, you all just gave up?" Tess asked sarcastically. "Just like that? You surrender?"

"No," he frowned down at her. "That's not what I-- I mean, there's nothing else that's..." He stopped and started at her. "Didn't Lex tell you?" he asked, looking puzzled. "Krypton exploded. There's no-one left. Almost no-one survived. Veritas _knew_ this," he ended, sounding like he was half-trying to convince himself. "They're all-- there's no one left to surrender. They're all dead or... they can't hurt anybody anymore," he ended roughly.

"That's not possible," Tess stated flatly.

"Why? What did Lex tell you?" he asked, looking like hed just bitten down on bitter herbs.

"He told me what I'm telling you -- he believes the same thing!" she said, standing her ground as the alien looked at her in clear disbelief.

"Lex isn't stupid," he said after awhile, looking annoyed with her.

"Yes, I know. So?"

" 'So'," he parroted her not-very-patiently, "If Aethyr and Nam-Ek were still around after the second meteor shower, they'd still be tearing up the place, burning people and snapping their arms and blowing up cars and otherwise _murdering_ the rest of the planet. Since they aren't," he continued with his crazy logic, "then obviously they're not. Same goes for everybody else," he ended, spreading his arms wide.

"How do you know that?"

"Because I--" he grimaced. "--I just know."

"That's not good enough." Then Tess paused, because there was something very true about what he'd just said -- the only way those two would have stopped would be if someone had stopped them. "You know because you stopped them." And she watched the alien look highly uncomfortable. "Who were you inhabiting back then?" she prodded. "It couldn't have been Lex -- he wasn't even in town."

"What??" he stammered. "I wasn't inhabiting anyone -- I was alive!"

Tess blinked. That hadn't been what she'd been expecting to hear at all. "... _Was_ alive?"

"Well, yeah. I'm... kind of dead now." And then he stared down and shuffled his feet a little. "Phantom, you know?" Like that said it all.

"You're not dead."

"Uh, yeah, I kinda am."

"You're not."

"I am! Ok? And I think I would know!" he said, crossing his arms and looking annoyed.

"What, because you've died so many times before that you have some basis for comparison?" And she watched it suddenly look a little embarrassed. "...You're kidding," she stated flatly.

"Well, it _is_ a little different this time, but... I really am dead!" he protested as she glared. "Lex killed me ok? I have no body anymore, that means I'm dead! I'm pretty sure that's how it works!"

"You have _Lex's_ body," she pointed out. And wow, she'd managed to get that out without sounding like she was two seconds away from throttling him out of it if she could.

He actually snorted. He made a snorting sound at her. Then he had the audacity to say, "Not really. Besides, this isn't my body, so it doesn't count."

 _I am arguing with a dangerous world-conquering alien ghost-like being who thinks he is dead, over whether he actually **is** dead or not,_ Tess thought bleakly. _This is my life right now._

"What do you mean, Lex killed you?" she tried instead.

The entity shut the hell up. Which was stupid, because she doubted that that would really narrow it down all _that_ much...

"I don't even know why you guys went straight to 'alien cohabitant' anyway," he muttered, looking somewhat incensed. "It's not like there aren't shapeshifters and magic users, and regular old meteor-created ghosts and body-snatching spirits, and all sorts of mind-controlling types and other stuff out there, too."

...Well, that was vaguely disturbing to hear, all put together at once like that. "Lex's bloodwork showed alien peptides of the type only found in the blood of those being overshadowed by a Kryptonian entity. --Phantom," she corrected herself, using his terminology.

"Alien peptides--" she saw thoughts run behind his eyes at high-speed. "Shit. Right." He closed his eyes and raised his hands as if to rake them through hair, then startled and stopped, blinking his eyes open when he hit bare scalp. "I--" he looked almost embarrassed for a moment. But then he frowned and slowly lowered his hands, as something seemed to occur to him. "Hey, he'd better not--" Then he frowned further. "He hasn't been trying to use his own blood to--" He started to look angry. "Is that why he's been looking so sick?!"

It took Tess a moment to see where he was going with that. "No, no -- he hasn't. The peptide levels haven't been high enough."

"That just means he'd think they'd need to draw _more_ for--" the alien said grimly.

"He hasn't been," Tess interrupted. "I've been overseeing his medical care, and I'm at his side nearly all day. I would know." _He'd better not have been,_ she thought resolutely. Then she almost had to mentally smack herself -- her, having something in common with this damnable Kryptonian!

"He'd damn well better not be," he muttered, unknowingly echoing her own thoughts as he scrunched up his shoulders again. Very un-Lex-like. Then he looked at her suspiciously. "You said he'd been getting bloodwork done--"

"It only takes a few drops; we haven't been bleeding him dry!" she snapped. And, oddly enough, her own anger seemed to calm him down.

After awhile, he added, "I guess it's good that you've got a way to tell for sure if somebody's a Phantom, if you have to," he acquiesced. "Most of them aren't very... nice."

"Neither are you," she shot back.

He glared right back. "I'm dead, and a ghost, and stuck inhabiting Lex's body whenever he's gone and done something unbelievably stupid. I'm pretty sure that at this point, I'm entitled to not have to try and be nice all the damn time, thank you."

"Not even when a lovely lady kisses you?" Tess asked.

"What are you talking abou--ou-ou-t? " and then he belatedly got a deer-in-headlights look. "Uh-- no-- that's-- I-- I have--" then he looked horribly pained for a moment, "Had. I-- I had-- just had a-- I only just... got out of... a relationship-- I mean, I _just_ \--" he said, sounding hangdog about it and backing up a step, then two, "and, uh, I-- I'm not--" He swallowed, hard. "You kiss really nicely," he ended lamely, looking like he was making an effort to stand his ground and not run away, or flinch, or twitch. Or get beaten into the floor by an angry female whose kissing style had been incorrectly complimented. Pfft. Geeky Kansas boys. Who apparently had had their hearts broken only recently, and were patently unable to be all stoic about it.

If Tess had had any doubt that he might not be Lex before...

"I'm-- I'm going to bed now--" he said uneasily, clearly wanting to go for the quick escape.

"You haven't watched the tape all the way through," Tess pointed out. "Aren't you going to respond to him?" she added, wondering how long she might be able to keep him talking.

"It repeated three times already; I doubt anything will change in however many more repeats the video does until the end of the DVD," he said, rolling his eyes as he opened the door. "And I said I'd watch it, not that I'd respond." And with that he made his exit.

Tess pursed her lips, thinking back. Had she really been that tired? ...She checked the tape just to be sure. And to give him a head start. Then she pursued him.

When she got to Lex's bedroom door and tried the doorknob, it rattled. Locked.

"Go away!" she heard the muffled yell from the other side of the door. Probably hiding under the sheets. She had no doubt he wouldn't be taking Lex anywhere else that night.

Tess smiled to herself and walked away slinkily back to her room. _Still got it._

She reminded herself to let Lex know that he should add "girl-o-phobic" to his list of alien traits.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex stared up at Tess the next morning from his bagel at the dining room table. After a long pause: "You're kidding."

"No, sir." Tess looked very proud of herself. Almost the cat that ate the canary.

"...Surveillance?" he asked weakly. He didn't like the idea that this thing might be wandering around as him during all hours of the night. It might explain his now all-too-common fatigue, though.

"Even better." Tess handed over an audio recorder.

Lex frowned down at it, then glanced up.

"I added an audio recording bug to my necklace," she responded, almost shyly, playing with it about her neck.

"I see," said Lex.

"It should sync up with the mansion's video footage nicely," she said, glancing away, then down at her own breakfast. "I, ah, didn't quite catch everything from the beginning, but..." She straightened and suddenly looked highly professional. "I did manage to garner quite a bit of new information from him," she ended decisively.

Considering how professional she was acting now, Lex noted that she must have acted about as inversely _unprofessional_ on the tape. "I'm sure you did," he said smoothly, and wondered if the woman was capable of blushing. He hoped to god that she hadn't... _She really needs to know that she's my sister,_ he decided. _Soon. Just so long as she hasn't..._ He clamped down on a shudder that he would _not_ let pass through his frame.

"We'll watch after breakfast," he said instead, and kept his thoughts to himself under his usual pleasant mask.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex Luthor very carefully put his vaunted self-control to good use and did _not_ hold his head in his hands. Neither did he get up, walk over to the window, and pound his head against the wall. He was great at self-control. He'd learned it well from having to deal with his father.

Oh yes, Lex Luthor was _excellent_ at self-control. So, instead of doing all those things he really wanted to be doing, he merely leaned back, closed his eyes, and gestured at the screen, with its still-running audio commentary, and asked, "Do you know who this is?"

"Kal-El," came back the prompt, smug, and expected response.

Lex sighed, and exerted his vaunted self-control again.

"Yes, that's true," he said. It came out a little more weakly than he'd intended--

"Sir?"

\--and of course Tess picked up on it. He pinched the bridge of his nose and asked, instead, "Do you know who Kal-El _used_ to pretend to be?" _Before he inhabited me?_ was the implied after-explanation.

He heard her pause. Inhale. Pause.

No, he hadn't thought so.

Lex knew, though, and it was posing a very big quandry.

His cold hatred of the alien being inside him died out not even halfway through the talk in the kitchen. He really should've known. Of all the people who had known enough to be able to hit him that hard, Clark had been one of them. Lex had only discounted the idea because (a) "Clark Kent" was patently not giving a damn about him at the moment, one way or the other, and (b) he never would've thought that the Clark he knew would have done anything so horrific, to anyone, for any reason. He'd thoroughly missed the fact that his mostly-silent passenger might view what he'd been doing highly as self-destructive and, knowing Lex, gone for a decisive tough-love approach that he knew was tough enough to shock him out of it enough to _actually work_. And it almost had. ...Until Tess had handed him this.

Of course, he was still immeasurably angry with Clark-nee-Kal-El, and would love to toss his rage to the rafters and destroy everything in sight, then find a way to make Clark hurt like hell for what he'd done... but at least Lex could understand it, and maybe even forgive him for it, now. After suitable revenge.

Though given Clark's response to Tess regarding 'relationship status', Lex might've already had pre-emptive revenge on him. If one didn't count that whole thing with Lana leaving him for Clark before all that followed. And all of the lies over the years. And Clark failing to tell him on multiple occasions about anything to do with the failed alien invasion. And never admitting to being an alien himself... though Lex supposed he could maybe let that one slide on account of self-preservation instincts -- Clark already had few enough of those as it was. But he'd also halfway strangled Tess to death last night, a highly inappropriate response under the circumstances, and to say that Lex was not pleased to see how easily Clark could turn homicidal was a _vast_ understatement. Lex wasn't going to let him off the hook for that one, though he had also managed to stop himself without any outside influence acting upon him; Lex certainly hadn't been the one to stop him.

Yes, Lex felt that there was still some appropriate and fully-justified raging that could be going on just then.

But he really did not have the time to let himself indulge. Because at this stage he realized that it was quite possible that he knew as much or more than Clark did, at least about some things in his after/life. And anything that dealt with Lana and the two of them was also a very big quandry, indeed. So. Two quandries. And a headache. And...

"Son of a bitch..." he breathed out, as it finally occurred to him. " _He wasn't lying._ "

"...Sir?"

"That-- man. At the Kent Farm." _Who isn't Clark, but **is** Clark Kent._

Oh fuck. This just got a hell of a lot more complicated.

And if this conversation was any indication, Clark hadn't known. ... _Still_ didn't know.

_Shit._

"...Sir?" Tess was starting to sound worried. That wasn't good.

 _...Well, at least Clark defended me from my half-sister, to suffering no worse than a kiss?_ Lex thought with no small amusement because, well, if Clark could be counted on for _anything_... it was to not get past first base with his little half-sister, apparently. And cockblock her from having sex with her older brother.

Lex sat back and started laughing hysterically.

_Clark saves the day again!_

~*~*~*~*~*~

After Lex had calmed down enough to explain what was so funny about Clark saving people... not that she got the joke... Tess was frowning her way through understanding everything he'd told her.

"So you think he's been a Phantom all along, and just never knew?" she said incredulously.

Lex cocked his head and rubbed at his temple absently. "Possibly. Or something went wrong with the Orb." He grimaced. "But _if_ Kent wasn't lying, then it would make an odd sort of sense, what happened. I wanted Kal-El depowered, having to listen to me, and unable to affect the destiny of the human race on any large scale." He paused. "And I did want to keep him close..." he mused.

"You give new meaning to the phrase, 'Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,' sir."

Lex rewarded her with a smirk.

"But sir, that's still only three of the four. He doesn't listen to you," she pointed out. "In fact, he seems to spend most of him time _unable_ to listen to you." _Quite possibly on purpose,_ she didn't voice. _And maybe only two of the four, instead of three, if he took over Lex and had access to LuthorCorp's resources..._ she realized. She also decided to keep that to herself. For now. Lex sometimes seemed borderline-paranoid enough as it was, or at least took risks that were far in excess of the proportion of risk she felt was proper for him to be taking in trying to forestall those worst-case scenarios.

Lex seemed to think for a time on what she'd said out loud. "The Orb was made to control Kal-El," he said slowly. "But the English meaning for 'controlled by another' in Kryptonian is actually closer to 'does as one's superior strongly desires'." He turned and looked at her. "I haven't exactly been trying to give him direct orders to interpret. All I've ever written him are questions, and I've only ever tried indirect means by which to communicate."

"So how can you communicate with him directly?" _Without losing control of your body,_ she wondered.

"I'm not sure," he said, sounding almost amused, as he looked over the Orb, which they had retrieved from the Arctic. He picked it up and rotated it in his hands slowly. "This didn't exactly come with an instruction manual, you know..."

Tess sighed softly. She hoped this wouldn't involve more car crashes. Or trips to desolate, snow-filled landscapes. She'd had more than enough of both.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Clark grumbled, and rolled over.

Then he slowly blinked awake, because that was odd. Rolling over.

Then he realized he had eyes to blink awake.

He stared up at the ceiling of the library. He was laid out on the sofa closest to the staircase.

"Damnit, Lex," Clark grumbled, sitting up. Then he realized that he felt... odd. Something else was wrong. Off, somehow.

He frowned, and pushed himself up on the sofa. ...The sofa didn't feel right.

Which was weird in and of itself, because Clark wasn't used to Lex's sense of touch yet -- or at least he _shouldn't_ be -- and his own sense of touch... hadn't...

Then he realized that he couldn't smell anything.

And his vision was off.

The colors weren't quite right, and... his hands were his hands.

Not Lex's. His. His-as-Clark. His hands.

Clark looked up.

He wasn't asleep. His dreams weren't like this anymore.

He had an odd suspicion.

He rose and walked over to the bookcases, and looked at the titles on the spines.

Backwards.

He shivered, and had a fleeting sense of 'Through The Looking Glass' as a few lines of it spooled through his head, almost like a song to absent music.

His head swiveled like a compass to true north, to the mirror in the library.

Lex was standing on the other side of it, smiling, eyes staring in, arms braced on either side of the mirror.

Then he leaned forward and Clark _felt_ more than _heard_ the 'tink!' of the Orb against the other side of the glass, as Lex raised it above his head and it impacted lightly.

Lex's smile widened slightly. His eyes darkened.

Clark felt an almost physical pull towards the mirror and didn't fight it. He stomped over, his rage growing. _How dare he,_ Clark thought. _How dare he stuff me in a box, stare in at me like a pet bird in a dollhouse, an animal in a cage! Like I'm here for his amusement, to play with!_

Clark lips curled back from his teeth, and when he came to a stop in front of the mirror, opposite Lex, who looked up at him with that same self-satisfied look he'd had when he'd placed the Orb in the crystal control panel at the Fortress.

Clark glared down at him. _I'm already dead and gone; I **shouldn't** have to put up with this crap anymore._

_...So why the hell should I?_

Clark looked at the Orb and let the rage build, then looked Lex straight in the eye and gave him a dark sneering smile in return.

_Like hell I'm going to dance for you, human._

He pulled back his arm and slammed a fist forward. He shattered the mirror.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex jerked and fell.

Tess caught him on the way down. The Orb dropped from his grip and rolled off to the side.

Lex's breathing went sporadic. His eyes blinked open, dazedly.

 _What did you see with your eyes closed?_ Tess thought. He'd stood at the mirror and had his forehead pressed against it for hours. He'd closed his eyes a few minutes ago, and pushed the Orb up against it, right before he'd collapsed.

"Are you all right, Lex?" she asked.

Lex took a shaky breath. "I don't think he was happy about the Orb. I shouldn't do that next time." He took another breath. "Though it was helpful in getting his attention in the first attempt."

"Sir? What happened?" she finally dared to ask.

"I tried to visualize him in the library." He licked his lips. "It took awhile to get everything right, and then to try and image him already being in it. Then he _was_ there." Lex slowly sat up. "He woke up confused. Then he saw me. Then he saw the Orb and got _very_ angry. He came over like I wanted, but he attacked me at the mirror and I lost my concentration."

"Sir!"

"It's all right, Tess. I think he just wanted me to go away. I wasn't exactly being nice about it. Or giving him a choice," Lex ended in a mutter. "He's never really liked being forced to do things. Or not do them. Or having to confront things he doesn't like."

"I'd noticed that he seems to be inclined to run away from things, myself," Tess added dryly.

Lex nodded, thinking hard.

"Sir, after what happened with Belle Reeve... I _don't_ think you should be going easy on him."

"I wasn't planning on it," Lex shot back dryly. He slowly stood up, then stumbled.

"...But maybe you should take a break," Tess amended, but Lex waved her off.

"I had him before; I shouldn't stop now." Then he glanced at her. "You didn't see anything in the mirror, did you." It was almost a question.

"No, sir. Should I have?"

Lex smiled. "No reason you should," he said carelessly, turning back to the mirror and leaving the Orb where it was on the floor. "No one ever saw Louis this way, either," he said softly, bracing his hands on either side of the mirror again.

Tess wondered who Louis was, and tried not to worry about her employer becoming unhinged from all this. Whatever this was.

"Clark," Lex said to the mirror patiently, quietly, staring into it, eyes slowly growing unfocused. "Clark. Clark."

~*~*~*~*~*~

"Clark."

...Oh, god. Not again.

"Clark."

"Clark."

"Clark."

Clark put his hands over his ears, feeling worn down and worn out. His anger hadn't lasted very long, not when up against Lex's brutal, incessant, unrelenting efforts at communcation and control. Now all he really wanted was for it to just stop.

"Clark."

"Clark."

He was sitting next to the mirror, off to one side of it, back against the wall and his legs drawn up, too close to be seen. He did _not_ want to be seen.

"Clark."

He'd tried hiding behind the couches earlier. That hadn't worked because they'd disappeared and reappeared elsewhere on him. He'd tried slinging pool balls at the mirror from farther 'away'; chairs, too. Whenever he broke the mirror, the room just reformed again, and he found himself dragged from the nothingness right back into it. He'd tried bracing a table up in front of the mirror sideways. That hadn't worked any better than the couches.

"Clark."

He'd found he couldn't remove the mirror from the wall to lay it face-down on the floor, either. He'd tried prying it off. Repeatedly.

"Clark."

There was always a delay from when the room first started forming to when Lex appeared. If he let himself get drawn in and didn't fight it, he found he had some time to work within before Lex started exerting his influence within the interior.

"Clark."

If Lex didn't know where he was in the room, he couldn't do things to the room to draw him out, somehow.

"Clark."

Sooner or later, Clark ended up having to smash the mirror to get him to stop.

"Clark."

He couldn't just smash it repeatedly, though, because while the sensations were off, and not right, and just made him want to shudder sometimes... being in the unreal room was _still_ better than being cut off from _everything_ and not-drifting in the not-darkness.

"Clark."

Until he couldn't stand hearing Lex call him anymore and he had to smash the mirror.

"Clark."

_Why the hell can't he just leave me alone?_

Clark smashed his hands against his ears even harder to try and block Lex out.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex was leaning sideways against the glass, sitting on the floor, and just breathing. He wasn't even calling Clark's name anymore, and Tess was grateful for that.

It had been horrible to watch. And listen to.

If Lex was attempting to drive Kal-El insane, he was probably doing a pretty good job of it.

He'd been calling Clark over and over. Every so often he'd flinch, and collapse a little, and come back to his senses enough to tell Tess with a smile that he was making progress -- as though he needed to assure someone of this -- and then he straightened, resituated himself by the mirror, and went right back to whatever he'd been doing before.

Over and over and over again.

He'd missed lunch. And dinner. Even Kal-El would be pissed about Tess not taking care of Lex at this point. Lex only seemed to be half-present now as it was, barely muttering time to time in almost a whisper, completely unintelligible.

Tess figured she must be crazy to try this. If anyone asked, she blamed Lex for this, because _anyone_ would lose track of reality after watching Lex at this for twelve hours, so completely sure and seemingly, supposedly sane.

So Tess knelt down next to the mirror, and said into it, "Clark, or Kal-El, or whatever the hell you call yourself. You come out here right now and talk to him so we can get some food and some sleep or, so help me, I will shock Lex to force you out of him and then kiss you again."

"Nnnn-hrmmm," said Lex quietly, gaze unfocused, and tilting his head slightly further into the mirror.

Tess blinked. "What?" she said, then nearly bit her tongue.

"nnn-t ccc--" Lex sighed as he breathed out, his eyelids drooping.

"What?" she said, talking to the mirror but surreptitiously looking down at Lex.

And then, as though from far away, Lex said quietly, but clearly, "Not coming out. Make him stop."

_Son of a bitch._

"Where are you?" Tess asked.

"Not--"

"Where are you?" Tess pressed. Lex started to stir. His eyes focused slightly.

"Where?" Tess asked again, sharply. Lex had said something about not being able to see him earlier, but him hiding in the room somehow.

Lex's head came up. "Oh. He's next to the mirror," he said slowly, shoving himself upright and turning in place. "Blind spot. Damn."

Then Lex swayed slightly and said, "Go away."

"No, you come out where I can see you and talk to me, Clark," Lex demanded. "Now."

"No, go away." Tess could almost hear the difference in Lex's voice when Clark talked, now. Tired, halting. Unsure. "I don't like it in here. Feels wrong. Let me out."

"Come out and talk to us," Tess said, resigning herself to 'insane' status.

Lex... looked startled, his head jerked upward as though struck from behind, and he glanced up at her, his eyes coming into instant focus. "Out here... to us? I... I hadn't thought of that," he said speculatively. "That might be better, actually." He turned further, staring two feet out from the wall next to him, then closed his eyes and concentrated. Then he swayed and blinked open his eyes with a short gasp.

Then he grinned triumphantly.

~*~*~*~*~*~

::What the hell?:: Clark said, glancing down at his hands, then looking up at Lex. He'd felt a sudden sinkening wrenching feeling as the world spun... and now he wasn't on the wrong side of the mirror anymore.

Things didn't feel nearly so off, over here.

On the minus side, he was now sitting right next to Lex.

"Nice of you to join us," Lex chatted amicably. Clark stared at him. "I got a good lot of practice at this sort of visualization with Alexander... but I suppose you wouldn't know about that," he waved off.

::Your little-conscience-you, pre-meteor-shower?:: Clark asked, and then it was Lex's turn to stare.

"How did you--" Lex started hotly, sitting bolt upright.

::Detroit, needed to know where Kara and Lois were,:: Clark said. ::Had to use one of your stupid mind machines.::

But he'd been half-dead, comatose from the bullet to the head, and the only machine they could possibly have used to get any information out of him like that back then would have been...

"You son of a bitch!" Lex exploded, irate. "You were inside my head!"

::I'm inside your head _now_ ,:: Clark ground out. ::And, in case you hadn't noticed _\-- you jerk, leave me alone --_ I'd very much rather like not to be!!!:

"That's besides the point!"

::No, it isn't!:: Clark glared. And then he looked a little nervous. :: _\-- oh shit! --_ That white-suit-you isn't going to show up, is he?:: he said, glancing around.

"Who?" Lex asked, frowning furiously.

"Boys!" Tess cut in. "Could you two please stop arguing long enough for Lex to get something to eat before he collapses?"

::You haven't been eating? Again?!?!:: Clark turned on Lex with a glower.

"Well, if you hadn't decided to play hide and seek all afternoon--"

"All day--" Tess cut in, correcting him.

::Well, if you'd just kick his ass and make him take a break like _you're_ supposed to--:: Clark rounded on Tess instead.

"She can't hear you," Lex put in, standing slowly, with Tess' help.

::Oh, whatever,:: Clark said, crossing his arms and pulling his knees a little further up to his chest.

"You need to come with," Lex said down at where Clark was imagining himself to be. "I can't keep this up with you in another room."

::What if I stay here?:: Clark asked petulantly.

"Then I'll bug the hell out of you like I was before, only this time," Lex grinned evilly. "No hiding."

Clark glared up at him for awhile, but then he caved. :: _\-- Hate you so much --_ :: Clark thought grumpily.

Lex wondered a little about how much was getting through that Clark didn't intend. For the worse-sounding, more private-seeming things, his mouth didn't move, like just now.

::At least you won't be able to do this all day, every day,:: Clark said as they passed into the hallway.

"Oh, no?"

Clark gave him a look. ::Well, not and want to not seem crazy talking to somebody who no one else can see _\-- who is dead and isn't really there --_ so you'd better watch out.::

"Oh, on the contrary, it's actually harder to remember to talk aloud when I'm doing this."

::What??::

"Well, when I'm imaging this, I know I'm imagining this. I know it's not quite real. I see it as separate from physical reality, and myself as well." Lex stepped forward while leaning on Tess, and a slightly fainter image of Lex was left behind, then turned to face him. ::It's actually much easier like this,:: Lex grinned giddily, falling into step with Clark as they 'walked' down the hallway Lex was imagining for Clark.

Clark did a double-take, then side-stepped away from Lex, looking _completely_ freaked out. ::You--!::

Lex took a step closer to him. Clark stepped back. Soon enough, Clark was against the wall.

"...Lex?" Tess asked as Lex stopped walking and stood still, closing his eyes.

::You can't get away from me anymore, Clark,:; Lex smiled nastily, ::so don't even try.::

Clark shivered. ::Fuck you,:: he stammered.

Lex leaned forward and bracketed Clark, hands on either side of him. ::You're not going anywhere,:: he said.

::Stop it,:: Clark said, unsteadily. Lex could feel him shaking.

::No,:: said Lex. ::You're going to tell me everything you know.::

::Stop, Lex--:: Clark breathing grew erratic, but he didn't really need to breathe here, did he?

::You're not going to lie to me anymore.::

::St--:: Clark pressed his hands against the sides of his head. A flash of pain crossed his face.

::You're going to tell me every last damn thing--!:: Lex pressed.

::Nnnn--!:: Clark was visibly shaking.

::And you are going to--::

Clark let out a scream and collapsed, and Lex looked down on him, watching him writhe in pain. He slowly grinned, because--

"Lex!" Tess cried out, shaking him, and Lex was in only one of two places at once for just a moment.

...And then something snapped back into place.

Then Lex looked down, horrified, and suddenly backed off.

Clark's screams turned to incoherent moans, and he twitched and curled in on himself.

_Oh god, what did I just do?_

But Lex knew _exactly_ what he'd done. He'd said that he wanted Clark to tell him things, to not lie. He'd _said_ all sorts of things.

But what he'd _really_ wanted was for Clark to hurt.

And he had.

"This isn't what I wanted," Lex whispered.

_Oh, but it **was**. You wanted control, control of **him** , and now you have it!_

_Shut up._

_Doesn't it feel **good?**_

_Shut up._

_Doesn't it feel good, to bring him low? To make him suffer? Didn't you **enjoy** it?_

_Shut up!_

Silent laughter, fading.

"Lex," Tess said, and Lex realized that it hadn't been the first time. He -- in his physical body -- was kneeling on the floor firmly encircled by her arms, and he was grateful for the support.

"Why did you shake me?" he asked, hoarsely, bringing his hands up to hang onto her arm. Feeling Clark still hurting, lying there crying and shaking behind him, in his mind's eye.

"You were... grinning."

"Not in a good way," he asked flatly.

He felt her shake her head.

He closed his eyes again. "Thank you, Tess."

"...For what, sir?"

"Stopping me."

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex couldn't get Clark to come into the dining room with him.

Actually that was incorrect -- Lex could have forced him to do it, but it probably would have had adverse effects on Clark.

When Lex tried to approach him, Clark curled in on himself further. He didn't even try to stand, let alone run. ...Maybe because Lex had told him he couldn't get away.

He flinched away from Lex when Lex touched him, whimpering.

Lex felt sick.

So he left Clark where he was.

He tried not to think about what the difference was between physical and mental pain. Whether one was worse than another. And whether there was an upper threshold for purely mental pain, or not.

Lex was deathly afraid that the answer might be "not".

When he realized that Clark seemed to do better recovering in whatever dark place he'd been in before, he stopped trying to hold onto the 'hallway' so hard, stopped trying to firm it up and pull Clark back every time he felt himself losing track of it.

It felt almost like a mental fugue state -- nebulous, dark and nonexistent, from what little he could sense of it. He couldn't see Clark being happy there, under normal circumstances, and he didn't like the implications of that.

Tess tried to press him to eat, but Lex wasn't hungry. How could he be, after that? It wasn't reasonable.

"If you don't eat, Clark will be angry," Tess tried.

Somehow Lex doubted that very much.

"You're both sharing the same body," she added. "If you don't eat, you're hurting him, too."

Lex hated her more than a little for it. Blatant, manipulative, completely blunt, and totally unrefined. But it got him eating.

It turned out it didn't matter. He threw it all up again later.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex gave him a day.

But the next day, he tried again.

"Clark."

::Go away.::

Clark was on the couch in the library. Lex was sitting on the other side of it, letting him hide.

Letting him. Because Clark didn't have a say in the matter.

"Clark."

::Go away!::

Lex could hear the tears he was crying.

"Clark."

::Leave me alone!::

"Clark--"

:: _Why won't you leave me alone?!?_ :: Clark shrieked, curling in on himself even tighter.

"Clark..."

::You can never just leave me alone!::

"Clark," Lex turned to get up, then stopped himself, barely. He'd promised himself he wouldn't push Clark that hard.

He'd promised himself. Not Clark. He hadn't even bothered to tell Clark. Hadn't thought to.

God knew what Clark thought.

Or if he'd believe him.

::I didn't do anything wrong!:: Clark cried out, desperately.

"Clark--!" Lex said harshly.

::I don't want to be here!!!::

Lex gritted his teeth. Was it really that bad?

::I'm supposed to be dead. Why won't you let me stay dead?:: Clark wailed.

Lex... didn't know what to say to that. He swallowed, hard.

::Just leave me alone! Why won't you leave me alone?!::

So Lex left him and let him be.

~*~*~*~*~*~

"I don't want to talk about it," Lex told Tess.

He felt her eyes on him. Measuring. Watching.

"I don't want to talk about it!"

~*~*~*~*~*~

Lex had nightmares where he walked up to the Kent barn and Clark Kent was standing there waiting for him.

"Got everything you wanted, did you, son?" he'd say.

Lex usually woke up screaming from those.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Then, one day, Lex walked into the bullpen of the Daily Planet, and straight into a gun.

Well, not quite, but almost.

Lex had stopped short at seeing the hostage situation. The criminal had swung it right around in his face and smiled at him from under the ski mask. It was only inches away from his nose, though.

"Hello, Moneybags," the man said. His three compatriots snickered for some reason.

Lex raised his hands slowly. He saw Tess do the same in his peripheral vision. "This doesn't have to end badly," Lex said slowly, looking the gunman in the eye, and wishing Clark was here. Wishing Clark was himself and separate, and here.

Wishing Clark was ok and himself again.

And maybe inclined to help Lex, just once more.

If wishes were horses...

...Lex hadn't gone riding in a long, long time.

"Oh, but what if we want things to end badly?"

"...Pardon?" Lex asked, his hands starting to lower in his confusion.

The man laughed, and Lex could smell his bad breath from three feet away.

"What if we _want_ things to end badly?" he said slowly. "What if that's exactly why we're here?" And Lex took in the grins of the others.

_Oh god._

And Lex knew he was going to die that day.

 _...What's going to happen to Clark if I die?_ he suddenly realized. Kryptonian Phantoms could usually choose their hosts, but Clark wasn't usual by any stretch of the imagination, and neither were his circumstances. And he was _stuck_ in Lex, wasn't he?

The man raised the gun and cocked it.

 _No!_ Lex thought, turning pale, his heart racing.

The man's grin got wider.

_Somebody HELP!!!_

~*~*~*~*~*~

Tess wouldn't have seen it if she hadn't been watching, but she was and she did.

Lex's eyes rolled up into his head, and his knees went slightly loose. Then his gaze sharpened, he seemed to straighten and he looked slightly confused for a moment.

Then his hand snapped up -- fucking hell, he wasn't even moving that fast, really -- and he effortlessly snatched the gun out of the gunman's hand.

He made it look easy. (Tess knew better than _that_ from her Checkmate training.)

 _Then_ he seemed to actually become _aware_ of his surroundings, looking around.

Tess almost laughed herself sick on the spot. _Who the hell has an automatic reflex for stealing guns from criminals?_ she thought with a widening smile.

The gunman stared at Clark-in-Lex, as did the other three. Clark stared back.

Then Clark stepped forward, punched the disarmed gunman in the face, grabbed him by the front of his vest, and pulled him forward.

He flipped the gun around in his hand and, using the man as a human shield, shot each of the other three in rapid succession. Both arms each.

Once the others were no longer capable of holding or using a weapon, Clark shoved the first man back, and pistol-whipped him across the temple. He went down like a sack of potatoes.

No-one other than Clark had managed to get off another shot.

Start to finish, it had taken Clark less than seven seconds.

Clark surveyed the scene and then, upon realizing that there was no-one else who needed shooting apparently, let out a long breath and relaxed all-at-once, dropping his gun hand to a neutral position at his side. But after that, he paused and tensed as he seemed to realize something, and slowly turned back to the one female redhead in the room that he knew.

"Tess," he said grimly. "What. The. Hell."

"Welcome back!" Tess said happily, grinning.

Clark _glared_ at her.

~*~*~*~*~*~

"This better not have been a damn setup!" Clark started in on her once they were firmly ensconced in one of the Daily Planet's many soundproof rooms. This one was a conference room that Lex had had renovated recently.

"I'm glad you're feeling better," Tess chirped back.

"I mean, Lex has done some pretty fucking stupid things before, trying to catch me out at doing something, or trying to make me do something I usually wouldn't do, so if this _is_ a setup--"

"You are feeling better, aren't you? Last time Lex said that you'd collapsed and weren't talking to him, and then he wouldn't talk about you at all," she continued.

"--Are you even listening to me?" Clark asked.

"No, not really. I'm just glad you're both in one piece!" Tess enthused, then stepped forward and hugged him.

"Oh god, did Lex put you on some weird medication, or something?" Clark asked, sounding a little panicked.

"Nope! Just glad you're back!" Tess said brightly.

"...Right." Clark sounded entirely unconvinced, but awkwardly wrapped him arms around her and patted her on the back nevertheless, not quite returning the hug.

Tess really _was_ happy that he was back, though. Lex had been absolutely _miserable_ without him. Foul moods, short temper, up and down like a yo-yo, running himself and everyone else into the ground for weeks at a time and then crashing despondently for days afterward; just out-and-outright horrible to deal with all around.

If she'd learned _anything_ from the old guard of staff Lex still had around, it was that Clark had always brightened his mood and evened him out. He'd been _pleasant_ , with Clark around.

Before Lex had learned about the whole alien thing, anyway. Before he'd learned about any alien things at all, actually. Back when they had still been friends. Long ago, years ago, before Lex had gotten involved with his third wife. And then uninvolved.

Generally, the staff from the mansion were of two minds on this. There were those who loved Lana, and hated Clark... although they freely admitted under further questioning that they had used to like Clark before. There were those who loved Clark, and hated Lana -- and those had been fired, and only hired back after the divorce, after no small apologies were exchanged.

And then there had been that eclectic few who had liked Lana, but _really_ liked Clark. Because apparently it was of _their_ rarified opinion that Lex had been a hell of a lot happier with Clark around then Lana, and where Lana was, Clark had not been.

Which Tess had found really damn interesting all around.

~*~*~*~*~*~

"Don't you tell him," Clark said.

"He's going to know," Tess pointed out.

"I don't _care_ ," Clark gritted out, then had to take a deep, hitching breath to settle himself. "Just don't _tell_ him."

"You know he's going to know," Tess pointed out, again.

"Just don't tell him."

~*~*~*~*~*~

"...How?" Lex said as he sat up on the couch in the Planet's fifth floor lounge area a short while later.

"I'm not supposed to tell," Tess dutifully reported, with a smile.

Lex blinked up at her. Then he slowly brightened.

"I'm not supposed to tell," she repeated, for good measure.

~*~*~*~*~*~

**Author's Note:**

> AN2: Working on more of this, hopefully soon-ish. I tend to bounce between fics a lot -- this one's been waiting around awhile for the first major post; far too long, actually. I finally sat down, did my own edit-check, and proclaimed it post-ready today (probably could've ages ago, oh well *shrugs*). This is another one of those ones which I feel like I could either split into a fic of its own as part of a series, or split up as chapters of a fic. I chose the latter in this case. *shrugs again*


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